


Unplugged

by WaterandWin



Series: Unplugged [1]
Category: Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Cyberpunk, Alternate Universe - Future, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Gen, M/M, Non-Serum Steve Rogers/Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes | Shrinkyclinks, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes, angst & fluff but mostly plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-04
Updated: 2015-01-04
Packaged: 2018-03-05 06:47:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 31,966
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3110039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WaterandWin/pseuds/WaterandWin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A scifi AU with a fascist police state, a genetic caste system, a skinny young man who should not be alive for reasons too numerous to list, and the partially brainwashed assassin who shows up at his door in the middle of the night to send the world crashing down around his ears.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unplugged

**Author's Note:**

  * For [doctormccoy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/doctormccoy/gifts).



> This is my (very belated) stucky secret santa gift for Gabe. Sorry for the delay!! 
> 
> I guess I should throw in a disclaimer that I tried to pay homage to Aldous Huxley and borrow terms from _Brave New World_ , but then didn’t realize until about 2/3 of the way in that fandom might see Greek letters and think A/B/O so here is me coming out and saying right off that bat that there is _NO_ A/B/O of any kind here. Breathe a sigh of relief. 
> 
> My other disclaimer is that here be a lot of computer science and biology mumbo jumbo and I know very little about both so I’m sorry if you do and some of this makes you cringe. Feel free to correct me.

Long before Steve was born, if stories were to be believed, it used to be that one could poke his head out at night and hear laughter or music or television sets. Even after dark, there would be groups of men and women in the street. There were places to go back then, too—art museums and baseball stadiums and movie theatres, even bars with alcohol and dancing. Steve’s mother knew this, because her mother and father before her had told her stories from when they were children, and they remembered it all, she said.

“Why didn’t the Eugenics Police stop everyone?” her young son would ask.

“There were no EPs back then,” she would explain gently. “This was before the war.”

When Steve was a child, he believed his mother’s stories. He wanted to believe them still. It was the believing that was important now, she had told him once, shortly before she died. One had to believe that things could be better to fix them. And so to this day Steve would curl up each night to the sound of the curfew siren, close his eyes, and try to believe. But when the siren faded and the silence replaced it, the only sound he could imagine was that of splintering wood and the heavy footsteps of Alpha boots.

The sound of his door giving way still found its way into his dreams, even now. It woke him in a violent jerk that stole his breath and sent his heart hammering so loudly he couldn’t be sure if it wasn’t the EPs thundering up the stairs. Sometimes he would find himself on his feet at once; other times he would just lie rigid as a board until his breath would come normally again. But sooner or later, whether he managed to go back to sleep or not, there was always silence.

Except tonight. It was no dream that had woken him. The urgent rapping at the door came again.

Steve froze. Although he had practiced what to do in this situation a thousand times, he had no intention now of squeezing his frame into the crawl space behind the bed again and huddling there, still and quiet, while the officers tore unimpeded through what was left of his life. Though he stood no chance against a squadron of half a dozen Alphas, if he were to see his life end in the Labs either way, he wouldn’t go without resistance.

The knock came again, frantic, as Steve rolled barefoot out of bed, threw on his scarf and reached for his bat. EPs wouldn’t knock, he realized as he crept down the stairs, especially not at the door of a Delta.

He placed his feet carefully in the exact spots he’d memorized, where the floorboards made no sound. No, this couldn’t be the EPs. They would have broken through the door without question. Wood meant nothing to them. And yet, curfew should have long been in effect even for Betas by now. Who could it be if not an Alpha at this time of night?

He was halfway down the steps, fully in view of the doorway, when the knocking suddenly ceased. There was a brief stretch of silence, and then with two forceful shoves, the wood around the deadbolt exploded. Steve raised the bat as he’d seen men do in the old movies, ready to strike.

Silhouetted in the doorway was a man. Steve knew immediately by his height and build that he could only be an Alpha, but instead of the standard black and white uniform he wore the grey jumpsuit of an Epsilon, marred with dark patches that looked too much like blood. One arm was tucked limply at his side, wrapped in a swash of dark plastic and obviously badly injured. In the other he clutched a gun larger even than the ones carried by EPs. He looked right at Steve through his curtain of long, dirty hair, but he didn’t move.

“I’m warning you,” Steve told him, readjusting his grip. “I don’t go down easy.”

He didn’t know what he expected to happen, but it wasn’t the man’s eyes darting away to assess the rest of the room instead. The downstairs half of the house would have once been a living and dining room, but they had both been repurposed for as long as Steve could remember. The front was now dominated by a mechanic’s bench, and in the back, past a curtain, was the room where Steve’s mother had once seen patients after the public clinic had been closed down. In the era of cybernetics, one needed a bit of both medicine and technology to make a living.

Without warning, the man took a step forward. Steve readied his weapon, but the stranger paid him no mind. Instead he lumbered—slowly and with a limp—for the work bench, and let himself fall onto the nearest chair. His gun clattered to the floor beside him, and there was a similar metallic clink when he dropped his injured arm onto the table.

“Fix me,” he said. His voice came out like gravel, either long unused or like he had just screamed himself hoarse.

Steve neither lowered his bat nor took his eyes off him as he crept down the last remaining steps, mindful of every movement like he was cornering an animal. Just as slow, he reached out and pushed the door closed. The plastic had slid off the arm laid out on the table, and the limb now glinted under the last few wisps of light before the room was plunged into darkness.

People had come to this house for help more times than Steve could count. It was Deltas mostly, but Gammas would come too if it was something their doctors would force them to buy new parts for. Once, many, many years ago, he’d seen a Beta at the door. Alphas were a different story entirely. They were hatched and reared in the police barracks with all the care they would ever need. They didn’t get sick. Rumor had it they could heal any injury in the blink of an eye.

The only light now came from the halo around the drawn curtains. The shadowy outline of the stranger didn’t move as Steve drew closer, and in fact he sat so still that when Steve leaned his bat against the counter and finally flicked on the dim little light on his workbench—one that wouldn’t be seen from outside—the first thing he looked for was unnatural tautness of the skin around the eyes that gave away an AI. Instead he found a human, tired and covered in grime and rust, but looking back with an unnerving intensity.

Reluctant to hold the gaze long, Steve looked down at the arm. It was utterly gleaming, made of dozens of interlocking plates. The fingers were a bit different, their joints more exposed but assembled for dexterity. The thing that inevitably drew his eye, however, was the damage itself, a huge rip in the outer plating just below where a deltoid muscle would have met a bicep. Judging by the sturdiness of the make, it must have been something with a lot of force behind it.

Tentative about so much as making a sound, Steve picked his first question carefully.

“What alloy is this?” he asked.

The man only shrugged with his good shoulder.

It had always been Steve’s parents’ policy not to ask more questions than strictly necessary. They knew as well as their customers that what they did was not strictly legal. Fixing what was broken, as the New Order saying went, impeded the broken being replaced by the better. So the less anyone cared to know, the safer they all would be. Granted, he doubted they had ever come upon a situation quite as strange as this one.

“May I?” he asked instead, hand hovering over the ripped metal.

When the man returned with the smallest of nods, Steve carefully directed the light to illuminate the damage. Whatever had caused it didn’t go very deep, only breaking the surface and severing the pneumatics and wiring beneath. The way the undamaged plates articulated it looked like each had a range of motion all its own, probably capable of folding together to increase force as necessary. Below them—Steve blindly groped inside a few drawers to find his pliers and get a better look—below them were the damaged wires. More than he’d seen in most mods close to this size, and thicker, too. Past the wires appeared to be the machine’s coolant system, fortunately spared anything more than a slight dent. Judging by the coating on it, the mod must have had a nuclear power component, but of course anyone would be insane to attach that much radiation to a human body, even a genetically enhanced one. Batteries nowadays could last decades before they needed replacement, making a nuclear component sheer overkill, plain and simple, but of course the issue of power was none of his concern at the moment.

“So what are you experiencing, exactly?” he asked.

The man said nothing. When Steve looked up, he found him still alert and watching.

“Numbness?” Steve suggested. “Pain? Restricted motion? What is it you need me to fix?”

Again the man said nothing.

“Listen,” Steve told him. “If you won’t tell me I can just ‘jack it out of you.”

If his arm was like this, his cybernetic port was probably beyond state of the art. Steve wouldn’t have put money on it being backwards compatible with the old datajack in the diagnostic interface he had, but an adapter was a simple enough thing to make, if one minded the exposed wiring.

As it was, he didn’t get the chance. At the first mention of it, the man’s hand shot up to cover the back of his neck.

“Look, there’s not much I can do without the specs,” Steve continued. “You can’t just fuse wires together, close it up, and call it a day. A mod this size is probably mounted to your spinal cord. If I just went in blind with a blowtorch I could paralyze your legs, your heart, your _lungs_ —”

“No,” the man told him flatly. “No uplink.”

“So what do you want me to do, disassemble it piece by piece?” Steve would be lying if he said he wasn’t curious. Technology like this was still years from the market, and certainly decades ahead of anything this workbench had ever seen. The chance to reverse-engineer something of this caliber would worth the trouble four times over.

“Would that fix it?” the man asked.

“I didn’t mean literally. I mean—well, without the blueprints I would have to disassemble it a little. Maybe a lot, depending. I don’t want to pinch anything, though, so I’d have to dismount it firs—”

“No,” the man said again. “No dismounting.”

“You want me to gut your arm while it’s still attached to you?”

The man shrugged again.

“That’ll hurt, you know,” Steve reminded him. “I can’t turn off the damage sensors without the uplink. It won’t be like digging around inside flesh exactly, but it won’t be a walk in the park, either.”

“That’s fine,” the man sighed, sitting back in his seat. He sounded awfully tired. “I trust you, Stevie.”

The pliers clattered to the table. The noise was far too loud in the dead of night.

“What’d you just call me?” Steve blurted, louder than was safe to speak.

The man with the metal arm only blinked, just vaguely startled by the commotion.

“How did—” Steve cleared his throat, trying his hardest to sound and breathe normally. “Where did you hear that name?” He tried his best to keep his voice down, but even his heart seemed like it was hammering loud enough for a passing patrol vehicle to hear. “Where’d you hear it?” he demanded again when there was no response. He was just about ready to shake him.

If anything, the man just looked confused. “What name?” he asked.

“You know what name! You just said it!” It took every ounce of Steve’s self control not to grab him by the collar and throttle him, even if that’s as far as he was likely to get. Near as any Alpha should be concerned, Steve didn’t exist and never had. There was a very good reason that he was on no census and no databanks, and if that ever changed he knew he wouldn’t have much of a head start to outrun whatever came next, if he could even bring himself to do it. Any amount of common sense ought to be telling him to start packing right this minute or else just grab his bat and meet whatever came at the door.

The man, meanwhile, winced and brought a hand to his temple like he’d just felt a nasty headache come on. His mod hummed softly, adjusting to the drop in blood pressure.

“I— what name?” he managed through gritted teeth, but he was suddenly sheet-white and breathing like someone trying to keep down bile. If it was an act, it was an awfully good one. Steve’s grip on his pliers loosened.

“Wow, easy, easy,” he coached, hands off where they would both be seen. “Stay with me.”

Physical damage aside, the problem now clearly presented with a neurotech component, and Alpha or not Steve wasn’t going to abandon the issue until it’d been seen through to the end. More than likely it was some kind of virus running amok in the man’s cyber-neural interface, though Steve’s expertise on the matter was limited at best.

“Listen,” he continued once the man’s breathing had evened out some. “I have some diagnostic software I can run. If you’d just let me uplin—”

The metal arm swung up without warning, knocking the tools right out of Steve’s hands and sending them flying into the rack of parts hung on the far wall so hard one of the shelves gave way and sent a cascade of plastics thundering to the ground.

“No uplink!” the man roared.

Steve was too frozen stiff at the sudden wash of noise to so much as reply until he was sure there were no tires in the distance punctuating the silence. The man, on the other hand, didn’t seem as concerned. He gave Steve a glare, breathing hard, before he collapsed back into his seat.

Steve stared at him, agape. He could feel something bubbling up inside him, but until his horror subsided he didn’t realize just what it was. Then, like something inside him flipping a switch, it dawned on him. He was _livid_.

Grabbing a hold of the light, he wrenched it up onto his guest’s face.

“Now you listen—” he began sharply.

There was meant to be more to it than that, but just as suddenly he realized something else. He found it in the man’s wild, unfocused eyes squinting away from the light and in the knot of his eyebrows and in the push of his cheekbones. He then he saw it too in the arch of his nose and the curl of his lip and even a little in the shape of his jaw. Sixteen years older though he was, Bucky Barnes’s face was much the same.

The only thing Steve could bring himself to do was breathe his name.

The mod whirred in response. Its owner, on the other hand, did little more than let out a grunt of pain and shove the light away. Steve caught it before it could swing into anything.

“Bucky, buddy, it’s me,” he tried, voice wavering more than he would be willing to admit. “It’s Steve. You just called me— Bucky, c’mon, Bucky, look at me,” He didn’t look, not even when Steve turned the light on himself. “It’s me, look. I—I thought you were dead. Or worse! What did they— How did you—”

Light-blind as he was, Steve didn’t see the hand that darted out of the darkness and grabbed him by the collar until he was being yanked forward and practically off his feet. He blinked, and suddenly there was a pale faces just inches in front of his.

“Shut up,” Bucky spat. “And fix me.”

He let go of him with such a shove that Steve found himself slammed down into his seat whether he wanted to sit back down or not. There he remained, stunned a moment as if waiting for something else to happen, but nothing did.

Here’s the thing that didn’t make sense: Bucky Barnes was supposed to be dead. Steve hadn’t seen it with his own eyes but he heard it with his own ears, and there was no room for doubt. In the right light, the blood was still visible in the grains of his bedroom floor.

Here’s the other thing that didn’t make sense: it just wasn’t possible to turn someone into an Alpha if they’d already been hatched something else. Not for lack of trying, if history was to be believed, but when the late, great Howard Stark managed to create the first true Alpha, he did it by starting at the zygotic stage, when all his work was being done to a single cell. Even today, almost fifty years later, anything more carried a high risk of failure.

So it couldn’t be Bucky that sat in front of him now, breathing hard and nearly shaking with pain and exhaustion, but it was. There was no one else it could be. Steve would know him blind.

The man breathed a sigh under his breath. “Please,” he said, so quiet Steve barely heard him.

Bucky had never been very good at waiting, but that could be said for all children. Still, in the midst of so much uncertainty, it was something. Steve looked between his familiar face and his alien arm before he finally, reluctantly, reached back into his drawer and pulled out a few sizes of screwdriver.

“Do you need something to bite into?” he asked.

The man, no longer looking at him, shook his head. Steve didn’t press him. Instead he took a deep breath, more for his own benefit, and got to work.

**  
**  
  
  


Steve didn’t make his first friend until he was seven.

It wasn’t like he had any opportunity to before that, being an illegal child. Most people didn’t know he existed and his parents worked hard to keep it that way. The few people that did know—all regulars who had plenty of dirt of their own they wouldn’t want the EPs to know about—helped in any way they could, with food rations and clothing in bright Delta orange. Still, he did remember them looking at him like he wasn’t quite right, or like he’d done something wrong or had something catching. His mother said it was because he was a miracle, like no one else in the world.

Of course, as Steve would later put together on his own, this was just half of a pretty white lie. Pass for a Delta though he might, his asthma was an Old Order sickness, and no matter how good the rest of his genes might have been—(and they weren’t)—diseased defects like his would have automatically typed him as an Epsilon, a death sentence from the moment of conception going back to the Epsilon purges of decades past.

Just Steve’s luck then that he’d never been typed at all.

At any rate, when he was seven, it became apparent that just about anything could make someone an Epsilon, even things that weren’t in their genes at all.

Back then, his parents used to have an old metal box hidden in the basement they called a radio. Every evening, just after curfew, they would turn it on and listen. Most days it was nothing, but sometimes a man’s voice would come out of it and he would say a lot of words Steve didn’t understand, and some which he did but which didn’t make sense to him. The voice would go on for about fifteen minutes, and then, sometimes right in the middle of a word, the radio would turn to static.

Being very young, Steve found the whole exercise dull as could be. He was usually put to bed before it all happened, and after a few times sneaking downstairs to get a listen, he gave up on the endeavor. He couldn’t understand a thing.

His parents, however, hung onto every word. It was on one of those evenings when the man on the radio did have something to say that Steve awoke shortly after curfew to the sound of the car starting. He rolled out of bed and, using a hand mirror so as not to be seen, looked out the window in time to see his father pull out of the driveway and head for the ghetto’s gates.

Immediately, Steve sought his mother for help. He found her in the basement, unfolding the spare cots she used when a patient needed to be watched overnight.

“Where’d Papa go?” Steve asked her.

His mother jumped. She was a steady woman in all things, capable of handling pints of lost blood and missing limbs with calm and care, but tonight, she flinched at the sound of her son’s voice.

“Steve,” she breathed. “I didn’t hear you come down the stairs.”

“Where did Papa go?” he repeated. “It’s dark out.” This he remembered being very concerned about. People who went out after dark didn’t come back.

“He went to bring guests,” his mother replied with the kind of smile adults use to answer difficult questions.

She hadn’t lied, however. Not this time. The guests were five in all, a whole family bundled up in green, all but one. It’s wasn’t exceptionally common, but once in a while it did so happen that a Gamma family could produce a Beta child, whether it be by mutation or the luck of recombination. Of all the castes, Betas and Gammas had the least rigid demarcation between them, ever since Alphas made any natural genetic exceptionalism on the Betas’ part pale in comparison to what could be manipulated by hand and machine.

At any rate, it was Steve’s first time seeing a Beta in person. For some reason, he had expected something more than a boy with two missing teeth and far too much sleep in his eyes. Steve didn’t bother paying him much mind anyway, because he was too busy hiding from the oldest of the children and the only one he recognized. Her name was Rebecca Barnes, and she came by every week to get painkillers for her little brother’s shoulder. He’d injured it roughhousing at the Academy last year, much to his parents’ great worry, and it never quite healed properly. A Beta doctor would have of course recommended they take the whole arm off, replace it, and spare the trouble, why not, but the Barneses knew better than to do that to a child, Steve’s mother had said, and it would be better to wait until he was older anyway because God knew teenage boys grew like bamboo shoots and he’d need the thing replaced at least a dozen times to keep up. Steve didn’t know what a bamboo shoot was, but he figured his mother was right.

As it was, Rebecca Barnes probably didn’t notice Steve was there any more than her brother did. For one thing, no one bothered to turn on any lights, and for another, the whole family quickly followed Steve’s father into the basement. Not even a word of greeting between anyone, nothing. And then Steve’s mother was taking his arm and leading him back up to bed.

“Are they sleeping over, Mama?” Steve tried to ask her. “Are they all sick?”

She didn’t answer until they were back in Steve’s bedroom. It was a cramped little place, with the bed capable of transforming into a desk during the day to make it look like an office, so that if anyone were to go upstairs they would never be able to guess there was a little boy living in the house at all. His mother closed the door firmly behind them before she kneeled down to her son’s eye level and took him by the shoulders.

“Steve, I need you to promise me something,” she said in a whisper. “Something very important. Can you do that?”

Her voice scared him, though he couldn’t anymore remember why. He nodded anyway.

“It might be very noisy outside tomorrow. You might hear a lot of people, or cars, or guns, Steve, but I need you to stay quiet and away from the windows, okay? They shouldn’t come into our house, but if they do, promise me you’ll do as we practiced. Do you remember how?”

“Yeah,” he nodded, following his mother’s lead to whisper, too. “I crawl into my secret hiding spot and I don’t make any noise until you or Papa comes and tells me it’s safe.”

It was the correct answer, which earned him a smile and a kiss, but something about it didn’t feel right at all. As his mother tucked him into bed, he asked, “what about the Barneses? Are they going to hide, too?”

His mother’s smile faded momentarily. “That’s right,” she replied cheerfully after a moment. “They have their own secret hidey-hole in the basement, just like yours. And you know what that means, right?”

“The EPs doesn’t know they’re here?” her son guessed.

“And?”

He had to think about it a moment. “And... I shouldn’t tell anyone they’re here, either?”

“That’s right, Steve. Not a word to anyone, promise?”

“But...” Something felt off about this, too, but it took him a second to put together just what it was. The whole thing was very confusing. “But they’re Gammas, and.... and Rebecca’s brother’s a Beta. What do the EPs want with them?”

His mother no longer faked a smile as she smoothed back her son’s hair. “Tomorrow morning, it won’t matter. There’s a new Mandate coming. A long time ago, our friends downstairs belonged to an Old Order religion that the New Order wants extinct now. They’ll be reclassified as Epsilons from here on out, come sunrise.

“I know it’s not fair,” she added just as her son opened her mouth to protest it. “That’s why we’ve made sure they won’t be at their house when the EPs come to take them away. We’ll protect them together. What you say, Steve. Will you help us keep them secret?”

He would, of course. With his life, but he wouldn’t know the meaning of that for some time. For now, he was yet to even meet them, but meet them he would, the very next day. He could even still remember the very first words the Barnes boy ever said to him.

He said, “you don’t _look_ like a ghost.”

Steve jumped and whirled around, and there he was. He looked about Steve’s age, maybe a little older, but it was hard to tell on account of Steve not having much to compare to except himself, and he was supposedly small for his age. The boy still wore his blue Beta jacket, even though the color wasn’t technically his to wear anymore.

“I thought you were supposed to be hiding,” Steve told him, carefully nudging the drawings he’d been working on under his elbow.

“Can’t hide all day,” the boy shrugged.

Stuffing his hands in his pockets, he pushed himself off the door and strolled further into the room, sparing a glance to all the shelves of spare parts, clean dressings, and approved books but never at Steve himself. “Besides,” he added. “Becca said your folks had a ghost living in their upstairs.”

“If there was a ghost livin’ up here, I’da met ‘im by now,” Steve told him flatly, a little annoyed that he wasn’t asked whether he’d mind the intrusion.

“So it’s true then?” the boy asked, finally fixing his clear, grey on eyes on him. “You can’t leave the house?”

“Neither can you,” Steve shot back.

“Yeah, but...” he rocked back on his heels. If Steve didn’t know better, he’d think he was nervous. “Word around is you don’t have a—you know...” He pointed at the back of his neck.

Steve unconsciously tugged his scarf tighter. “What’s it to ‘ya?”

“Well I ain’t never met a fella without a cybernetic’ before, and...”

“Who told you I didn’t have one?” Steve interrupted.

“Becca said that’s why you gotta be hiding all the time,” the boy replied. “If you don’t get one right after you’re hatched it gets real hard for your body to accept it and stuff, so maybe by the time your parents got you and realized the mistake it was too late, and you had stay hidden ever since.”

Steve wrinkled his nose at him. “You make that up yourself? That’s a stupid story and not even a little true.”

“Oh yeah?” the boy grinned, showing off the gap where one of his front teeth had only just begun to grow in. “What’s the scoop then, eh? Why don’t you just show it to me and prove you got one?”

“No dice.” Steve shook his head vigorously. “I’m not supposed to show it to nothin’ or nobody, no-how.”

“Aww come on, pal,” the boy begged. “Just a peek? I’ll show you mine first. It’s really something. C’mere, look.”

He didn’t wait for Steve to answer before marching up up to the desk and turning heel so he could get a look. His cybernetic port was a shining metal plug right above where his neck met his shoulders. Steve had only really ever gotten a close look at the ones his parents had, and theirs of course weren’t near as shiny and new as this one. If he looked real close, he could almost see it glowing faintly on the inside.

“Neat, huh?” the boy said. “Beta-class, of course. Latest one, just had it upgraded last winter. Uplinks so fast it near knocks the breath outta me sometimes.”

Steve wasn’t going to admit it, but it was pretty neat. He was just about to reach up to touch it when the boy turned back around. Caught red handed, Steve stuffed both his hands between his knees and painted on his most innocent look. If the boy noticed, he didn’t do anything about it but look pleased as punch.

“Your turn,” he declared.

“I shouldn’t...” Steve began, tugging nervously at the scarf again. “I promised my folks...”

“I won’t tell if you won’t,” the boy said with a wink. “What’s the harm, right? Who would I tell, anyway? The EPs? Ha, more like the Peepees, right?”

Steve couldn’t help but snicker. “The Peepees,” he repeated, and this earned a laugh from the boy, too.

“I came up with that one myself just now,” the boy admitted proundly.

It seemed, at the time, a very clever joke.

“Well...” Steve began, fiddling with the ends of his scarf again. It was a mangy thing, already frayed, and its garish orange was starting to fade into a dingy brown. “I guess maybe a peek won’t hurt, as long as you don’t tell nobody. Close the door though.”

Too giddy to say anything, the boy tossed him a quick salute and skipped over to silently edge the door shut. Even so, Steve’s hands hesitated in their grip on the fabric.

“Promise you won’t laugh?” he asked.

“You got my word,” the boy promised.

Steve wrinkled his nose at him. “What good’s your word if I don’t even got a name to attach it to?”

“My name?” he asked. “You won’t know my name? Gosh, I thought you knew all our names already. It’s—well, it’s _James_ , but there are a bunch of guys at the Academy named James so everyone just calls me Bucky, Bucky Barnes.”

“Oh,” Steve said, and then he remembered to add, “nice to meet you,” because that’s what you’re supposed to say when you meet somebody, and he’d never formally met anybody before. “I’m Steve,” he appended, and held out his hand just like they did in the movies.

“That’s a new one!” Bucky laughed but he shook it anyway. “Nice to meet you too, _Steve_. See, now we’re friends. Practically brothers even, on account of us all living together like one big family now. So how about that port?”

Steve suddenly found himself very nervous again. He’d never taken his scarf off for anyone but his parents before, and he wasn’t too keen on going without it.

“Actually...” he began. “Actually I have something even cooler I can show you.”

“Cooler than not having a port?” Bucky seemed unconvinced. “Like what?”

For this, Steve needed to slide off his chair. “You might have a port, but I got something you don’t,” he said.

He paused a moment just to savor the look of confusion on Bucky’s face. Then, making a show of checking over his shoulder, he lifted up the hem of his shirt.

“Wow!” Bucky gasped, and much to Steve’s amusement he stumbled backwards right into the wall. “Holy smokes! Were you shot?!”

Steve shook his head. “It’s what you get when you aren’t hatched. I was _born_ with it. It’s the port I used when I was incubating inside my mom.”

“ _Inside_?” Bucky asked incredulously. “How did you get in? How did you get _out_? Wait, is that why you’re so tiny?”

“Probably,” Steve shrugged, pulling down his shirt again. His mom was a pretty small lady, so it would make sense that he’d have to be small to fit inside her. “I’m a little hazy on the details myself. My parents are always busy when I try to ask.”

“That’s...” Bucky ran his fingers through his hair. For a second when he pushed it back, he looked just like the cool guys from the old movies, but of course it immediately fell back into his eyes again. “That’s...” his lip curled. “really, really gross!”

Steve’s shoulders dropped. “You’re gross!”

“No no,” Bucky waved. “I mean, it’s totally freakin’ gross, don’t get me wrong, but you’ve been _inside_ a person. That’s like... the coolest, weirdest, grossest thing I ever heard!”

“Wait,” Steve said. “You think that’s cool?”

It certainly was more weird than being made in a factory, he would give him that. Everything else in the world was made in factories nowadays, after all. That was just where stuff came from, people included. When two people wanted a baby and they had themselves a breeding license, they could march right down to the federal nursery and get one made for them, or so Steve was told. He’d never been, of course. He was the miracle that was made and incubated and born right at home without the New Order even knowing. He might agree with it being gross, since other people who’d found out about it seemed to think so. But cool? Nobody had ever thought it was cool before.

Bucky seemed to, however.

“Sure I do!” he said, and he really seemed to mean it.

“So you don’t take back what you said before?” Steve ventured as casually as he could. “We’re still friends?”

“Hey now,” Bucky put his hands on his hips and jut out his lower lip, and for a second Steve was nervous about what the next thing to come out of his mouth might be. “I’m a man of my word, Stevie,” he said instead. “And I don’t go back on it. If I say we’re friends then we’re friends, you hear me? And unless you do wrong by me or I do wrong by you, that won’t ever change.”

He wasn’t wrong, technically.

**  
**  
  
  


Disassembly was slow. The damage had warped a number of the arm plates, and in some places Steve had to break out the electric laser cutter to sever their joints. He was lucky at least in that each plate had its own unique serial number, but he kept them laid out in the table in articulation all the same.

The pneumatic exoskeleton and wiring underneath was a different matter. He could work around it with minimum interference, but it was unlike any mod he’d ever gotten a chance to look at. The musculature was standard, if of a much higher grade than even most Betas might be able to get these days, but the wiring was some kind of hybrid between the standard limb layout and, well, the closest comparison Steve could think of would be datajack cables. They ran up the entirety of the arm from what he could tell, or at least beyond the elbow, and the insulation was thick and reinforced with mesh, so it had completely escaped damage.

Bucky, understandably, didn’t care to watch. He’d wince occasionally, the veins jumping out of his neck, but he never complained. When a large enough area of the interior was exposed and Steve was able to isolate all damaged wiring, he brought out his souped-up car battery and volt ampere. Then, one at a time, he and Bucky went through each wire and tested ranges of motion, touch, and temperature sensitivity until the volt ampere detected a readout. On the other side, they would send a similar charge up through the wiring, and from there it was a matching game of a various assortment of labels and countless tests and retests of compatibility.

The process stretched on for hours. Steve could feel his neck starting to cramp but he opted to ignore it. Bucky, for his part, provided little in the way of conversation, speaking only when spoken to and declining any offer of water or protein wafer. To his credit, he was very good at keeping still, at least until the point when sudden and without warning, he jolted to his feet.

Steve was halfway to forming a protest when a hand was clamped over his mouth. Any further complaints were silenced with a single whispered word: “tires.”

Sure enough, a second later, he heard the quiet hum of an engine zipping down the street for himself. It got closer as he listened, but Bucky was already moving into the back of the shop, his weapon in hand. Steve threw a glance at his work table, strewn with tools and armored plating, and scrambled after. He caught Bucky just as he was about to reach for the back door.

“Wait,” he hissed. “They’ll see you. In here.”

He motioned him to the basement door instead. Bucky hesitated, staring uncertainly into the darkness beyond.

“You trust me, remember?” Steve reminded him, just as the screech of tires came from right in front of the house. His chest tightened. “Please, there’s a switch behind the—”

He never got to finish explaining just where the switch to access the hiding spot was because he was suddenly cut off by the blast of his front door being thrown open for the second time that night. He motioned frantically for Bucky to get inside, and by some great sway of fortune, Bucky listened. With shaking hands, Steve locked the door behind him and returned to his front room.

As expected, he didn’t make it two steps before he found himself looking down the barrel of a gun. He followed it up—and up, and up—to the masked face of the Alpha who, now that he had a reference for comparison, was actually bigger than Bucky. They all were, in fact, all ten or so of them spilling into his workshop with their military uniforms and guns blazing.

“Boss,” one of them said, just as the one with the gun pointed at Steve nudged him back with the barrel until he was backed right up against the side of the staircase.

The one speaking had a scanner of sorts in his hand, letting out a steady, punctuated beep that sped up as he held it over the table with Bucky’s parts. It seemed to be reacting one piece in particular, which the Alpha picked up and held up to the light.

Another of the EPs stepped forward and snatched it from him, flipping up his reflective faceplate to get a better look. On the inside of the piece was a tiny blinking light, unmistakably a tracker chip. The Alpha—the leader judging by the slightly different pattern of crisscrossing white and black stripes on his uniform—rounded on Steve and practically shoved the metal chip in his face.

“Where’s the rest?” he demanded.

Steve forced his shoulders down, looked him dead in the eye, and said, “how should I know?”

The Alpha gave a nod to the one holding the gun to Steve’s chest. The gun was pulled away momentarily, but just long enough wind back and come flying at his head. The next thing Steve knew, he was picking himself off the floor, vision spinning.

“No, you can stay there,” the head Alpha told him coldly, and suddenly there were two guns on Steve keeping him from doing more than sitting up. The head Alpha turned to one of his subordinates. “Who is this guy?”

“Carter,” Steve blurted before they could try running a search for his facial features in their databanks and come up with a suspicious lot of nothing. “Carter, S.. Delta. But the sign out front could have told you that much.”

“The address is issued to a Carter, S.,” one of the Alphas confirmed. “Last known occupant was four years ago, widow of no relation, Delta, no breeding license, no next of kin, husband arrested on high treason twelve years prior for—”

“I don’t care,” the head Alpha waved. “All I want to know is, where,” he crouched down beside Steve, fixing him with a look as he held up Bucky’s arm plate again, “did you get this?”

“Bought it,” Steve lied.

“Try again,” the head Alpha said.

“Bought it,” Steve repeated.

The Alpha grit his teeth. “Who sold it to you?”

“I don’t ask questions,” Steve shrugged. “I just hand over the credits. It’s good quality alloy. I wasn’t about to pass it up.”

“And did the seller tell you where he got it?” the Alpha asked, each word pulled slowly from his teeth.

“Well if you were listening, you’d already know.” Steve said, then leaned forward and whispered, “I don’t ask questions.”

The Alpha pulled a handgun and fired. Steve didn’t even get a chance to brace himself. Pain tore through his ear, and when he reached up to touch it, his fingers came back red.

“You got quite a mouth on you, Delta,” the Alpha told him, waving the gun in front of his face. “That was a warning. Next shot won’t miss, so consider your next answer carefully. Where’s the rest of it?”

“Rest of what?” Steve gritted, clutching his ear.

“The—” The Alpha began and then quickly cut himself off, narrowing his eyes at Steve. “The _purchase_ ,” he finally spat.

“What’s on the table’s what I got,” Steve said with a nod in the table’s direction, and the gall to throw in a small smile through the pain. “A few bent screws in the trash if you wan’em.”

For a fraction of a second, the Alpha looked like he really was going to shoot him in the face. Instead, he stood up abruptly.

“Search the place,” he ordered. His men jumped at the chance to obey.

“Hey!” Steve called after him over the ruckus of someone dumping an entire box of supplies out on the floor . “You need a warrant!”

“What are you going to do, Delta?” the Alpha replied without so much as looking at him. “Call the EPs?”

Steve was ready to surge to his feet, but two gun barrels shoved him back down. The Alpha looked down and curled his lip.

“You know,” he said. “I think I’ve had just about enough of you. You’ve already forced me to waste one bullet. You’re not worth two.”

He turned away, but before a smart comment could even form on Steve’s lips he spun right back around again. The last thing Steve remembered was his military-grade boot coming straight for his face, and the rest was darkness.

**  
**  
  
  


Bucky came to visiting Steve a lot. Steve would visit, too, sometimes, but Bucky was right that there wasn’t much to do in the basement. It was safer for Steve to visit him, he was told, because the hiding space downstairs was big enough to hold all of them in a pinch, but Bucky’s youngest sister, Leah, was still at the age where she was prone to crying fits, and Bucky said he would rather risk death than spend another minute cooped up with everyone else anyway. Plus, as luck would have it, he fit into Steve’s hiding spot with him, even if it was a tight squeeze.

Steve showed him one day how to pick at the loose floorboard under his bed and find the switch. Pulling it would make the trap door on the wall pop out a little, and then it had to be pulled out further by hand, exposing a little crawlspace.

“My dad built this before I was born,” Steve explained. “He’s a mechanic and a really good one. He and my mom fix people together, and when I grow up I’m going to fix people, too.”

The crawlspace was almost too small for Bucky to get through—almost. Luckily, it extended no further than a grown man’s arm, and just beyond it the top of the hiding spot got high enough that Steve and Bucky could sit side by side if they both tucked their knees and pressed in close. It wasn’t the most comfortable spot in the house, especially since there were some loose screws that stuck out of the wall in some places, like right behind Steve’s head and jutting into Bucky’s side. Not to mention, they also shared the space with a small flashlight and a box of medicine that Steve explained was hidden in there because people weren’t allowed to have anymore.

“Why not?” Bucky asked, directing the flashlight beam inside to get a look at the contraband. It wasn’t anything much, just a couple of canisters and a metal contraption not unlike a torture device.

“Well, I have trouble breathing sometimes because my lungs aren’t so good,” Steve told him. “Especially when I’m scared and can’t move very much, like in here. It’s called asthma and it used to be that there were lots of people like me who had it, but they got sorted into Epsilon a long, long time ago—Mandate 4 I think—and eventually the New Order just stopped making the medicine for it.”

“What happens if you don’t have the medicine?” Bucky asked.

“I’m usually okay,” Steve shrugged. “If I feel an attack coming on I have to try to relax and take deep breaths all the way into my lungs, and there’s lots of stuff that’s supposed to help like soda and this tea my mom makes for me. But a couple of times it’s been really bad, and if I didn’t have this I’d probably die.”

He showed Bucky how the metal contraption worked, strapping it onto his head and fitting the front between his teeth like a bit. The technology itself was at least a hundred years old, like the late twenty-first century or something he guessed, so it wasn’t very comfortable.

“Is that... is that what happened to everyone else like you?” Bucky asked.

Steve shrugged again and tried to pull the headgear off. He could hardly make a sound with it on, but the back had gotten caught on one of the screws sticking from the wall and he momentarily needed Bucky’s help getting it free.

“I’ve never met anyone else like me,” he said once he could talk again.

Bucky looked very solemn at the thought. Steve watched him clench and unclench the fingers on his left hand like he did when his injury bugged him.

“They aren’t going to make your medicine illegal,” Steve assured him. “Everybody hurts sometimes, even Alphas, probably.”

“Yeah...” Bucky said. “It still doesn’t seem fair though, even if it’s the natural order.”

“I think,” Steve added after some thought. “I think the natural order or whatever they want to call it stopped being fair once we started deciding that some people had more of a right to live than other people ‘cause of their genes.”

“It’s for the greater good, though,” Bucky replied, and Steve recognized in his wording the very same slogan that the New Order liked to use to justify all the Mandates they pushed through.

“It sure ain’t,” he said right back. “Nothin’ good about killing people before they ever get a shot at living. And I bet you secretly agree with me, cause otherwise you’d be out there letting them kill you too for all their talk about purifying the gene pool.”

Bucky didn’t seem to have anything to say to this. He looked like he was thinking about something awfully hard, and Steve realized he might have gone just a little too far, so for a while they just sat there in silence, cooped up in the dark, with a flashlight balanced on Bucky’s knees.

Then out of the blue, Steve asked, real quiet and possibly by way of apology, “can I tell you a secret?”

“‘Course,” Bucky said, though he still sounded deep in thought.

Then there was silence again. Steve picked at his cuticles, and then he finally reached over, scooped up the flashlight, and turned it off. Suddenly they both found themselves in darkness so complete they could no longer tell their eyes open from closed.

“I’m not gonna hide either,” Steve said after a moment, voice small and reedy and higher than normal. “I know everyone wants to keep me safe, but I’d rather they take me fighting.”

“Who? The EPs?” Bucky asked. “Haven’t you ever seen an Alpha, Steve? They’re huge! They’ll kill you dead before you can even blink. Ain’t nobody stand a chance against that, much less you.”

“Not the point,” Steve frowned. “I’m not giving them the satisfaction of fishing me out by my ankle from this hole in the wall. If everyone just goes on thinking that nobody can stand up to these guys, nobody ever will.”

Again Bucky didn’t say anything, but just as Steve got ready to turn the flashlight back on to get a look at his face, he said, finally, in a voice just barely over a whisper, “fine then. Guess I’ll just take ‘em on with ya.”

**  
**  
  
  


“Oh, good, he’s breathing.”

The first thing Steve knew was that he had a splitting headache. The second was that there was a woman speaking somewhere above him.

“Can you hear me?” she was saying. “We’d come back a different time, but this is urgent.”

Steve was vaguely aware of someone helping him into a sitting position, but it still took him a moment to crack open his eyes. There was daylight streaming in through what was left of his door. The first thing he checked for was his scarf, but it was on good and tight as he’d left it.

“You’re awake! Great,” said the woman beside him. “You’re the owner, right? Carter? It is Carter, right? Listen, Carter, we really need your help.”

His head hurt, but his ear hurt even worse. It was sticky when he tried to touch it.

After a few more blinks, the woman to come into focus. She was young and very pretty, but what really stood out about her was the shock of red hair so stark against her green Gamma uniform. Steve’s head spun.

“Here, let me help you with that,” she said, and suddenly there was a bottle of syntho-skin in her hands. Steve winced when the cold aerosol hit the side of his head, but it took the pain in his ear away almost immediately.

“Thanks,” he mumbled, pushing her hand away and trying to climb to his feet. He managed it with the help of the stairwell for support and the woman’s hand under his elbow.

The room was almost unrecognizable. The shelves were smashed and empty, all their contents in pieces on the floor. The curtain hung crooked on the window, and through the doorway Steve could see that the back room fared no better. On his workbench where Bucky’s parts had been the night before was what looked like a body, clad in the same Gamma green as the woman.

“He’s fine,” she assured him. “Just vertigo.”

Steve picked his way over the remnants of a chair to get a better look. The man had a cap pulled down over his face, but his head lifted and his eyes opened when Steve’s shadow fell over him.

“When did the vertigo start?” Steve asked.

The man on the table looked to the woman.

“Oh, he can’t hear you,” the woman explained. “It’s something wrong with his aurals. Double CICs. Think you can fix them?”

“I can take a look,” Steve replied, though when he went to switch on the spotlight he found the bulb dead. He scanned around the room for an undamaged spare and instead found a penlight under his foot.

“Well, they’re both still in place,” he assured after a quick check in each ear. “Did they both go out at once, just like that?”

“Oh, no, no,” the woman replied. She had drifted from where she found Steve to peeking around the corner to his back room. “One of them’s been out for ages. Say, do you boys need some water? I’ll go get you some water.” She set her handbag down on the workbench to tap three fingers to the corner of her mouth and the man nodded.

“There should be glasses in the—” Steve began, was she was already disappearing up the stairs. “—kitchen,” he finished to himself. He looked down at the man, who only blinked back innocently and shrugged.

Steve sighed, hands on his hips, and scanned around the room for his diagnostic interface. He found it in the corner sporting a cracked screen, but by some combination of luck and industrial strength manufacturing, the old girl still managed to light up when he coaxed her on. He heaved it onto the table at the man’s side and pulled out the datajack, holding it up where his patient could see. It wasn’t hard for to put together the question, and with a nod the man turned his head so Steve could fit the jack into the cybernetic at the back of his neck. Readouts filtered down the screen automatically.

Overhead, the ceiling creaked as the woman moved around upstairs. By the sound of it, she was in the master bedroom, which was odd considering the bathroom was directly across from the stairs and there would be no water to be found anywhere else. When Steve strained his ears, he could hear a faint knocking from upstairs, too, an occasional, faint _rap tap tap_ on the wood paneling. Like she was looking for something in the walls.

His eyes flew immediately to the back room. The basement. Did they get into the basement? The thought of Bucky being dragged over his unconscious body kicking and screaming through the front door was nearly enough make Steve sick to his stomach.

He had to know. He was sure he wouldn’t be able to focus on another thing until he knew for certain if Bucky had found the secret switch. It felt like every nerve in his body was screaming at him to go and check the basement door, but he could scarcely breathe at the thought of what he might find there.

He’d only just taken the first few steps away when the diagnostic interface on the workbench beeped. Steve glanced down at it and frowned. There was no way what he was seeing was right, but none the less he cautiously pressed a button on screen.

“Can you hear me?” he asked.

The man blinked, then pushed himself upright. “Loud and clear,” he replied, scrubbing his pinky in his ear like it was nothing. “Thanks, bud.”

“No problem...” Steve said slowly, crossing his arms. “It’s funny, there wasn’t much I had to do. They were just turned off for some reason.” He paused, then added, “almost like someone turned them off on purpose.”

The man looked down at him. Steve looked back. For a second neither moved, and then Steve’s nerves got the better of him and his eyes darted to the doorway.

Faster than he could even blink, the man lunged for the handbag at the end of the workbench.

“Tasha!” he yelled as he pulled something long and thin out of the purse and vaulted off the table. “He’s down here!”

Steve’s blood ran cold. He barely had time to raise a hand before his head was shoved down against the workbench, but not before he caught a glimpse of the object his attacker was brandishing. It wasn’t a gun or even a knife but an arrow, and with what at first appeared to be a blunted end at that. A split second later, Steve’s thoughts caught up enough to process what it was: a jack. The arrow was a datadrive.

He tried to throw the man off, but he was outsized and outmatched. Even with his head wrenched to the side, he could still hear the woman fly down the stairs and through his workshop to the back room. Steve may have only had the faintest idea of what was happened, but he did know one thing: if by some miracle Bucky was still in the house, he couldn’t afford to be much longer.

“Bucky!” He bellowed with all the power his lungs could muster. “Bucky, run!”

The crash from downstairs was just about the sweetest sound Steve had ever heard. He found himself beaming, even as his head was pushed down harder into the table. When his attacker yanked Steve’s scarf to get at the back of his neck, Steve was ready for him.

“What the fuck?!” the man gasped.

Steve kicked. It caught the man just enough off guard for Steve to drop himself to the floor and bolt for the back room, scarf left tangled in the attacker’s fist. But that didn’t matter. Nothing else did.

The basement door hung from its frame on one hinge, and no one had bothered to turn on any lights. There was another crash from downstairs, and then another.

“James!” the woman was saying, trying for some semblance of calm. Another crash, a grunt. “James, relax, you know me!”

Steve didn’t bother waiting at the top of the stairs for the man in the other room to catch up. He nearly tripped on something at the bottom of the steps, and when he reached to flick on the lights, he saw that it was a pistol. He scrambled to pick it up.

The basement had clearly not been spared the search received by the rest of the house, but the EPs had at least missed the fake paneling that sectioned off the secret room. It was flung open now, onto the biggest mess thus far. At the center of it all were two figures thrashing around on the floor.

Bucky had the upper hand. The woman was pinned beneath him, her arms held above her head under Bucky’s metal fingers, while his flesh hand hovered above her throat. For some reason, that was as far as he’d gotten. He looked, if nothing else, shaken to his core.

“Natalia?” he breathed.

“Glad we all know each other,” Steve bit, turning the gun on the man just now thundering down the stairs and stopping him in his tracks. He wasn’t even sure himself if he had the guts to pull the trigger, but there was enough adrenaline coursing through his system that he was willing to put himself between Bucky and anything that stood in his way without a second thought. “What’d’ya want with my friend?” he demanded.

“I thought you were restraining him,” the woman said to her partner.

“I was,” he replied, baffled. He was still holding the arrow in one hand, and the scarf in the other. He might have said more, but just then Bucky winced and doubled over, clutching his temples.

“Easy, James, easy,” the woman coached, taking him by the forearms. “We can fix this.”

But Bucky wasn’t taking it easy. His every muscle looked strung up and coiled, like he would lash out at the slightest touch, and his every sucking breath seemed to require the movement of his entire body. Everything about him screamed for space, but by some madness the woman did not let go. No one else in the room dared even move.

“That’s right,” she said, though nothing had changed. “You know me. I’m here to help.”

This, at last, did it. Bucky’s head slumped forward, hair falling over his eyes, and his shoulders dropped. He swayed slightly. For the longest time, no one even dared make a sound.

“A little help?” the woman whispered, not taking her eyes off him.

Steve didn’t think anything of leaving his gun on the nearest upturned box and crossing the room. Kneeling down, he took Bucky by the shoulders and eased him away until he could sit him on the floor. Bucky let himself be moved without resistance or protest. Wherever his mind was, it wasn’t in the room with the rest of him.

When Steve looked up, his attacker was helping the woman to her feet. He wanted to loathe them, he really did, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to trust them, but what the woman had said was caught in his mind and he wasn’t ready to let them go without questioning.

“What did you mean you can fix him?” he asked, arm still around Bucky’s shoulders.

The two exchanged a look. “I think it’s best you try to forget the last twelve hours,” the woman said, looking at her partner as she said it. He offered her nothing but a bewildered shrug.

“Not that easy with me,” Steve explained as his hand unconsciously slid to cover the back of his neck. She narrowed her eyes at the motion, but after a second something seemed to click.

“You’re unplugged,” she said.

It sounded more like a statement of fact than an insult, but Steve ignored her anyway. “How did you find Bucky?”

“We followed the Crossbones, of course,” the man replied. “You know,” he added when Steve gave him a confused look. “The Eugenics Police? The Alphas? The guys in the black and white uniforms that beat the piss out of you?”

“Got it, thanks,” Steve replied sourly. “But why?”

“We’re the reason he got away from them in the first place,” the woman answered. “We were taking him somewhere safe.”

“Why should I believe you?” Steve demanded. “You knew his name. How do I know you’re not just taking him back to the Labs?”

“Do we look like EPs to you?” the man asked.

“No, but you did try to put a virus in my brainstem,” Steve retorted.

“Look, it wasn’t personal, okay?” he tried to argue. “Natasha, coming after him was your idea. Help me out here.”

The woman, Natasha, took the scarf from him without a word and kneeled down, holding it out to Steve. Still crouched by Bucky’s side, he looked between her face and her hand before he cautiously plucked it from her grasp like he expected there to be a trick. There was none. She let him take it, and even waited until he wrapped it back around himself before she said, “come with us.”

“What?” Steve and the other man said in unison.

“It’s not safe here anymore,” Natasha explained. “If we thought the place wasn’t being watched, we would have come in and searched everything without the doctor-patient act. You’re right not to trust us, but trust the fact that the Crossbones _will_ be back when they run that fake name of yours. You can stay here if you want and wait for them, or you can come with us and fight back.”

“This is definitely pushing it,” the man sighed, running a hand through his hair. “The Winter Soldier I can understand, but this guy? You’d better be doing all the explaining when we get back to base.”

“Fight back?” Steve repeated breathlessly.

“Yes, but understand if we can’t say more here,” Natasha said. “The New Order doesn’t exactly look favorably on our activities, if you know what I mean.”

Steve let out a breath he didn’t realize he was holding. There had always been hints and whispers and stories of a resistance movement. If the stories were to be believed, there had even been an Uprising once, years before even Steve’s father was born.

Still, he had to ask, “And you’ll help Bucky?”

“You have my word,” Natasha said.

Steve looked to his friend, whose eyes were still fixed unfocused on the floor. Steve gave his shoulder a gentle shake.

“Buck?” he asked.

Bucky sucked in a breath and blinked, suddenly looking from person to person like he hadn’t realized they’d been there a moment ago.

“Buck,” Steve continued. “You wanna go with these guys?”

Bucky swallowed, studied all their faces again. “I know her,” he muttered at last.

“But do you trust her?” Steve pressed.

Slowly, Bucky nodded.

“Great,” the other man said. “Can we get this show on the road?”

“Can I have a few minutes to pack?” Steve asked. “And I should close up his mod, too. The EPs took all the parts I’m sure, but I could probably just use some sheetmetal to—”

“You can have one minute to pack,” Natasha said, climbing to her feet. “Go. Now. We’ll take care of the rest.” She turned to her partner. “Clint.”

“Yeah, I know,” he sighed, slipping out of his jacket.

Steve decided to bolt before they got ready without him and changed their minds about bringing him along. He packed quick and light: a change of clothes, a few essential tools, what was left of his asthma medicine. He knew he wouldn’t be coming back. By the time he returned downstairs with his knapsack, the others were already waiting for him, with one notable change.

“Aren’t those a little big on you?” Steve asked Clint, who was rolling up the sleeves on the stained grey Epsilon uniform he was now sporting.

“You’re one to talk,” Clint snipped. He reached into the handbag that was still sitting on Steve’s workbench, and pulled out a folded bit of metal and wiring that snapped open into a bow with a sharp flick. He slid it over his torso and reached back inside for a quiver of arrows.

“You know where to meet us?” Natasha asked.

“Yeah, yeah,” Clint replied. “But if I don’t show, you’d better send a rescue op after me. A big one.”

“Will do,” Natasha smiled and turned to Bucky and Steve. “You boys ready?”

Steve looked to Bucky, looking out of place and uncomfortable in Clint’s Gamma uniform. His hair was all but hidden under that garish green cap.

“So, we just walk out there?” he asked. “Just like that?”

“Why not, doc?” Clint grinned. “Gotta help your patient back to his car, right? Don’t worry if he’s put on a few pounds, his lovely wife is gonna help you.”

“Hilarious,” Natasha said, but not without leaning in and giving him quick kiss. “Try not to die.”

“You too,” he replied. “Not with the head start I’m risking my ass to get you.” And just like that ducked out by way of the back door.  

“That’s our head start,” Natasha whispered, slinging Bucky’s arm over her shoulders. “Let’s move.”

Steve mirrored her, and together they half-dragged Bucky out into the morning light. Steve didn’t even hesitate at the threshold, though perhaps it was because all he could do was to count the seconds of his breaths. It was only after his mother died that he’d even stepped off his own porch, and with ration dropped in by sky delivery and supplies traded online, he could count the number of times on one hand that he’d ventured as far as the curb. He half expected an alarm to sound, or some sniper to take him where he stood, but there was nothing. It was the same neighborhood he had spied on through reflections his entire life, still and silent in the early morning.

In the driveway was a van. Natasha opened the back for them and Steve pretended to help Bucky climb inside.

“Why don’t you go with him, doc?” Natasha said. “Just in case.”

Steve wasn’t about to argue. As soon as he hoisted himself inside, Natasha closed the doors behind him and slid into the driver’s side. There were no windows but for the windshield and small viewhole in the back, but Steve didn’t mind, pressing himself right up against the front passenger's seat to watch as Natasha pulled them onto the road.

He did glance back, once. He’d never seen the house from the outside at a distance so it didn’t much matter, and as the car careened down and away, the home eventually faded into a long line of perfectly identical houses and disappeared out of sight. It was everything Steve had ever known.

Almost everything.

He didn’t know how it happened, but somewhere after the second checkpoint out of the ghetto he looked down and found Bucky’s hand in his.

**  
**  
  
  


To nobody’s surprise, the moment Bucky found out Steve could draw, he insisted that Steve draw him. Even less surprising, Steve spent months resisting. He had every excuse in the book, and Bucky had every counter-argument.

“I can’t,” Steve groaned one day when he was eleven. “I stink at drawing faces.”

“All you need is practice, pal,” Bucky assured him. “Look, now that my tooth’s grown in, ain’t nobody that can resist this face.”

“I can,” Steve struck back, although his was a blatant lie, tooth or no. Steve’s teeth at least had the sense to grow back in straight, but even living up to his name, Bucky was just about the most charming person Steve had ever met, and that fact had remained true through all their lost teeth over the years and no matter how short the list of people Steve had actually met was.

“Aw, c’mon, please? It’s my hatchday,” was all Bucky had to say in the end for Steve to huff and puff and at long last relent. He would never tell Bucky, of course, but he’d been wanting to give it a try for some time now, though he’d be loathe to ask for it after refusing so long. He was even naïve enough to let Bucky talk him into cracking the curtains just the barest hint to let in the natural light.

“No one’s gonna see _us_ ,” Bucky assured. “Besides, it’s just a little. Who’s going to think anything’s up with a parted curtain anyway, huh?”

And Steve—well, Steve would never forget agreeing with him. “Just for a short while,” he said, and shut the door.

They settled cross-legged on the floor, Steve’s notebook in his lap, and began. Almost immediately, Bucky was looming forward, trying to get a peek.

“It’s not ready yet,” Steve scolded. “And it’s never going to be ready if you don’t sit still.”

“Well hurry up then,” Bucky pouted.

“If I rush it, it’s not gonna turn out right,” Steve sniffed back, though truth be told it was already not turning out right. He stared hard at Bucky’s nose like etching it into his mind’s eye would somehow help his hand reproduce it, but when he looked down he saw that all he’d managed to draw was a lumpy potato. He grit his teeth, turned the page, and started again.

“Wait, let me see it first!” Bucky said, and before Steve could stop him, snatched the notebook away.

“Don’t—” was all Steve had time to say before Bucky flipped back to the drawing and chuckled. Steve could feel his face heating up. “It’s not funny,” he insisted, grasping for the book back, but Bucky pulled it out of his reach and, to Steve’s immortal horror, turned the page back a second time.

It fell upon nothing incriminating, just a sketch of the inside of Steve’s bedroom. But then Bucky just kept flipping on past it it, through doodles from picturebooks and newsreels, advertisements and photographs, and then, just before Steve lunged to snag the book from him, the picture he’d hoped Bucky wouldn’t see. He ripped the book from his grasp, pressed the open page to his chest, and glared at him with every drop of indignation he could muster.

“What was that last one?” Bucky asked.

“It was nothin’!”

“Didn’t look like nothing,” Bucky smirked with that quirk to his eyebrow that made Steve’s heart feel like he’d just leaned too far back in his chair. When Bucky reached forward with one finger to pry the notebook gently away, some reluctance in Steve allowed his arms to loosen and his grip to go slack until the book fell open in his lap.

It was a picture of Bucky. He lay on his stomach, brow furrowed over the tablet he held in his hands, chewing his lip. It was one of those rare drawings that by luck alone came out markedly better than everything around it; with just a few strokes, Steve had managed to capture the look of fixed concentration on Bucky’s face with remarkable fidelity. As a result, he’d spent far longer on the sketch than most others, playing with adding a shadow here or fixing a line there, always second-guessing if he shouldn’t just leave the drawing be but always wanting to add more. In the end he’d left a permanent smudge over the spot where Bucky’s feet hung in the air gently crossed at the ankle, and in his mind, ruined the whole thing.

“You did this?” Bucky asked quietly.

Not trusting his voice, Steve only nodded.

“But you said you’d never drawn me.”

“You _asked_ if I’d drawn you and I answered ‘why would I ever draw your ugly mug’,” Steve mumbled at the floor.

“You dirty liar!” Bucky squawked, but he was grinning all crooked the way he did.

“Wasn’t a lie,” Steve shot right back. “I never said I didn’t!”

“Yeah, but you implied it!”

“Did not,” Steve smirked, looking back up. “Not my fault if that’s what you believed.”

“It sure is!” Bucky insisted.

“It sure isn’t!”

“Give me that,” Bucky said at last, pulling the notebook back and flipping to the next clean page. “And fork over the pencil, too. Only fair that I get to show you what I think _your_ ugly mug looks like.”

“I’ve seen a mirror before, Bucky,” Steve told him, even as he handed him the pencil.

“Then look somewhere else,” Bucky replied, and waved his eyes away. “No peeking.”

Steve huffed at him, but decided to make a point of being the better model by staring determinedly at the fragile sliver of sky visible past the curtains. He managed it for about a minute before his eyes strayed back to what Bucky was doing. He could just see the page if he looked sideways, but not what was on it, and as soon as Bucky looked up his eyes were fixed to the window again. He heard him tap the pencil against the page in thought.

Perhaps he should have thought something of the sound of Bucky very carefully setting the notebook down on the floor as quietly as possible, and perhaps he even should have done something other than stare confused at the same spot on the window when he saw Bucky lean forward out of the corner of his eye, but he didn’t do a thing but let his jaw drop when he felt lips press to his cheek, firm and slow. And then the second passed, and Bucky pulled away, and Steve rounded on him.

“What was that?”

“What was what?” Bucky asked innocently.

“You _know_ what!” Steve said, his voice not sounding like his own. “You—You—”

“Sorry,” Bucky shrugged, picking up the notebook again, and for the first time Steve noticed that the page was just as empty as it had been when he started. “Forget it. I won’t do it again if you don’t want.”

“I—” Steve began, a retort ready on his tongue if he could just find the words. “Why did you do that?”

“Forget it, I said.” Bucky sounded miffed, glaring down at the page. “Go back to lookin’ out the window or somethin’. It won’t happen again, you got my word.”

“But what if—” Steve swallowed, his tongue suddenly too big for his mouth. “What if I want it to happen again?”

He couldn’t bare to look at Bucky but he couldn’t tear his eyes anywhere else either, so he looked down at the notebook instead, and all the more so when he saw that Bucky was looking up at him, though with what expression he was too afraid to see. Whatever it was, he was quiet for what felt like the longest stretch of silence Steve had ever lived through, and for each second it ticked onward, he felt his heart speed up another notch and his face redden another shade brighter.

“Are you—” Bucky said at last, breathless as Steve felt. “You’re—Really? Steve, you’re not fuckin’ with me, are ya?”

Steve peeked up at him from under his lashes. Bucky didn’t look mad, or disgusted, or even scared at the notion of breaking one of the original Mandates. He just looked... he looked like he was waiting. And Steve, thoughtless and selfish as he was, forgot about the window completely and leaned forward to kiss him back.

He missed, or maybe Bucky moved at the last second and made him miss, or maybe he’d always meant to kiss him on the lips instead of the cheek, but before he knew it that’s just what he was doing. Or rather, that’s where he left his lips pressed for one second, then two, then three, before he sat back and tried and failed to catch his breath.

Bucky was still neither mad, nor disgusted, nor scared. Surprised, maybe, but that slowly spread into a big, wide grin. And then, of all things, he laughed.

“I didn’t think you had it in you, Stevie.”

“Yeah?” Steve puffed. “Well. Well, I didn’t think I had it in me either.”

“You’re a rotten kisser, though,” he added.

Steve shoved at him. “Like you would know!”

“Hey,” Bucky teased. “Maybe I would.”

“Who have you been kissing around here, then?” Steve teased back. “Your sisters? Leah’s only six, you hacker.”

“Ugh!” Bucky stuck out his tongue. “That’s unplugged. No, I was trying to imply that I’ve—uh, I’ve...”

“Go on,” Steve smiled, knowing by now the look on Bucky’s face when he knew he’d lost.

“Oh, just shut up and lemme show you how it’s done,” Bucky said as he pushed himself forward. And Steve, like a lovesick fool, let him.

**  
**  
  
  


They drove on until they hit the city limits, where the pavement got so rocky that Natasha didn’t even wait until they hit the fly zone before flicking the series of switches mounted above her rearview mirror. The old van shuddered like it might fall apart, and with a great sighing groan pulled itself up into the air. If Bucky had any protests about Steve digging his fingers into his palm hard enough to leave four crescent-shaped indents, he didn’t voice them.

“So tell me,” Natasha said when the shaking finally stabilized, with the air of someone well aware this was no atmosphere for light conversation. “How is it you two know each other?”

“I could ask you the same thing,” Steve replied immediately. Bucky said nothing at all.

Natasha actually laughed. After a pause, she said, “I met him in the Labs.”

Steve followed the answer up immediately with, “What were you doing there?”

She smiled at him in the rearview mirror. “Regrowing all my nerve endings.” He couldn’t tell if she was joking. “Your turn.”

Steve considered refusing, but given the very strange turn his life had taken over the course of the last several hours, he couldn’t help but desperately want to believe he really could trust her. Bucky seemed to, at least.

“My family hid his after Mandate 39,” he answered at last.

“Same house as the one we just left?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Just curious,” she said. “He made straight for it after we hit him with a scrambler. Thought he might have been going home, but when he entered the Delta ghetto—”

“You did _what_?” Steve blurted.

“We had no choice,” Natasha said, though she didn’t sound the least bit sorry. “He was charged with protecting something we had been sent to retrieve. Most people’s brains just shut down for a few hours. His cybernetic must be wired to his frontal lobes. Instead of going down, he just went berserk and made a break for it.”

“His frontal—” Steve stammered, outraged. Cybernetic implants were never meant to go that deep. It was a fucking invasion of privacy. There were strict regulations against anything deeper than sensory data, and of course mod readouts. That someone would do something so _low_ —

He looked back at Bucky, who sat against the side of the van with his knees drawn up and head tipped back, looking up dazedly at the ceiling.

“We’ll get him back,” Natasha assured, and when Steve looked to the road he saw she was watching him again. “He’s had a scrambler running in his head for eight hours. Once we turn that off, we can uninstall all the Lab malware and he’ll bounce back. Give him a few days.”

A part of Steve wanted to believe very much that that could be, but the rest of him knew better. Though computers could install and uninstall a thousand times and never change, a cybernetic was also part organic, and cells remembered. Even if the greatest technological mind in a century could try their hand at sorting Bucky’s head out and succeed, there was still a gulf of sixteens years between the boy he had been and the man he was now. He had been Steve’s friend back then by chance and opportunity, but now, given what Steve had let happen, given the time and distance and programming, given everything, what meaning would that friendship hold to him now?

“It wasn’t your fault,” Natasha said.

Steve looked up. “What?”

“It wasn’t your fault, Carter,” she repeated. “None of it. I don’t care how it happened.”

“How did you—”

“You said your family was protecting his. The state of things being what it is, it doesn’t take a genius to put together the rest.”

Steve bit his lip and sat back. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Believe me, I do,” she said. “And I also know that beating yourself up about it isn’t going to change anything. The best you can is to put it behind yourself and make the most of your second chance.”

Steve frowned. “And why are you telling me all this?”

With a quirk of her brow, she replied, “Consider it a hint.”

Steve wasn’t optimistic about getting anything clearer out of her. “Sure,” he agreed, and then, before he could think better of it, he added, “You already know Carter is a fake name. You don’t have to keep calling me that.”

“What do you want me to call you then?” she asked.

It had been a long, long time since anyone had called him anything else, but if he was getting his chance to fight he would take it only as himself. “Steve.”

“Steve,” she repeated like it was a curiosity. “How old fashioned.”

“Well, one of the perks of having an illegal child is that you get to give them any name you want, even one from the banned list,” he chuckled to himself. “But I doubt they named me after a traitor on purpose. I think my dad just wanted to name me after his father.”

“It did used to be a common name,” Natasha agreed. Steve decided that she must just always speak like she knew a secret no one else did. “Here comes out stop. Hang onto something.”

Despite the warning, she didn’t actually give Steve time to hang onto anything—not that there was anything to hang on to—before swerving the van sharply right, off the demarcated highway and into a copse of trees. Branches slapped angrily at the windshield, but if anything Natasha only sped up, weaving between their trunks at a dizzying speed. The change in acceleration was even enough to tip Bucky over so much so that he was forced to catch himself and blink at his surroundings.

“Shouldn’t you clear the trees?” Steve yelled over the racket.

“Can’t!” Natasha called. “We need to break line of sight with air patrol.”

She spun the steering wheel wildly again and the car careened to the side for a second time, slamming Steve and Bucky against the other wall.

“Where are we going?” Steve demanded.

“The Sound Holding In Eugenics Liberation Directives,” she sang back, and heaved the car sideways again. Bucky had to catch Steve’s shoulder before his head cracked against the van wall.

“The Sound?” he screamed over the noise. “It’s a Class 2 contamination hazard! No one’s allowed near it for good reason!”

Natasha didn’t answer at first. The light streaming through the trees grew brighter and brighter until suddenly they were clear of the trees entirely. The comparative silence practically had a vibration all its own as the car whizzed toward a cliffside, beyond which the yellowish-green waters of what had once been Long Island Sound shimmered with toxic slime. The air in the car took on an acidic tinge.

“That’s exactly why we’re here,” Natasha replied now that she didn’t have to shout. She’d long taken her foot off the accelerator, and now the steering wheel as well, unbuckling herself and leaning half out of her seat to the passenger's side to manipulate an array of knobs and switches beneath the dashboard. The cliffside approached.

“Um, Natasha?” Steve said.

She didn’t seem to hear him.

“Natasha,” Steve said more urgently.

All she said was, “working on it.”

The cliff was dangerously close now. “Natasha!” Steve yelled one last time, and then it was too late. The car coasted off solid ground and over the long drop into the waters below. For a moment the momentum held them steady, and then Steve felt the car tilt forward and start to drop out from beneath them.

He grabbed Bucky. He didn’t even know himself if it was to protect him or just to have something to latch on to as they both hovered, weightless, inches from the bed of the car, but when the water finally flew up to meet them his fingers were dug deep into the rough fabric of Bucky’s uniform. He squeezed his eyes shut just before impact, buried his face in Bucky’s chest, and held his breath.

There was a loud splash, and then he and Bucky hit the floor of the car, dry and whole.

“And we’re in,” Natasha said a moment later, followed by the click of a fastening seatbelt.

Cautiously, Steve cracked an eye. The water was a nasty, murky yellow color, and he wouldn’t have even been able to tell which way was up if it wasn’t for the bubbles streaming from the grill of the van. They were moving down—judging by the whirr of the engine, intentionally so. None of the water leaked inside, though the smell was overpowering.

“I think I’m gonna be sick,” he mumbled.

“Hold on, we’re almost there,” Natasha promised.

She straightened the car out when the sea floor came into view, and turned them back the way they’d come, skimming along the edge of the cliff until a dark hole appeared in the rock. The van slowed and Natasha maneuvered them through. Before long, their tires touched down on something solid, and a moment later they broke the water’s surface into a lit cavern.

It was easily the biggest enclosed space Steve had ever been in, but he didn’t have the luxury of stopping to look around because as soon as the water level allowed, he threw open the back doors and vomited what little there was in his stomach from the night before. The smell of the water didn’t help him one bit, but when he righted himself again he became aware that Bucky was holding onto the back of his shirt to keep him from falling out.

“Thanks,” he muttered, wiping his mouth with his sleeve.

Bucky didn’t respond.

“First time’s always the worst,” Natasha offered. “But look, we’re here. Welcome to SHIELD.”

The tunnel was a short, straight shot into a paved cavern. She pulled the van over not long after they’d cleared the waterline, beside a series of doorways carved into the stone. A group of people came streaming out of them even as the van came to a stop; none had on any one particular color to type them, but there was one man with the darkest skin Steve had ever seen, and a woman with eyes like he’d only known on old films. Both were races he knew had been typed as Epsilon so long ago they were thought to be extinct. He couldn’t help but stare.

A woman with short, dark hair tapped on Natasha’s window.

“Do you have it?” she asked when Natasha opened it for her. Then her eyes fell on Steve and Bucky and she frowned. “Who are they?”

“New friends,” Natasha replied, pulling what looked like a tiny metal briefcase out from her handbag under the passenger’s seat and passing it with the utmost care through the window. “The one in the Gamma needs to go to the neuro-medbay ASAP, and the other one should probably join him. You may also want to call in our resident cybernetics expert. I have a feeling he’ll overcome his disdain for us when he sees what we’ve brought him.”

“Who _are_ they, Agent Romanoff?” the woman demanded, handing off the suitcase to two people who left with it at once. “And where’s Barton?”

Natasha gave Steve a nod in the rear view mirror to go ahead and step out of the car. He did, coaxing Bucky with him and out of the way as Natasha shifted into reverse.

“I’m going back to rendezvous with Barton now,” she explained, pulling an expertly executed K-turn. “Take good care of them, Maria. That’s the Winter Soldier and Steve!”

“ _The_ Winter Soldier?” Maria called back, agast, but Natasha was already driving away with nothing but a small wave out the car window. Maria gaped at the vanishing van a second before composing herself and turning back to the two of them. “And Steve,” she finished, like it was just icing on the cake.

Her team all wore an array of expressions between confused and utterly terrified. Something about that and the way Maria schooled her expression into one of rigid authority told Steve’s instincts to take a step and put himself between Bucky and the others.

“Well?” Maria said to her team. “What are you waiting for? Restrain him.”

“No!” Steve said immediately, but nobody bothered to listen.

Behind him, Bucky tensed at the sound of his voice. It was a good thing that somebody shoved Steve out of the way, because the first person to lay a hand on Bucky was sent flying before Steve could even turn around to see what had happened. The next two were shaken off just as easily, though Steve could tell from the way Bucky stumbled from the exertion that he was either suffering intense pain, vertigo, or both. Immediately, he launched forward to try and help, but a second later someone was grabbing him from behind and pulling him back and right off his feet until he could do nothing but uselessly struggle in midair, arms pinned to his sides. Bucky let out a wordless cry and surged forward, knocking another four people aside just to get past them, but in the end even Steve’s shout of warning didn’t spare him one of the team members getting the drop on him with a datadrive.

Bucky dropped uselessly where he stood and lay still.

“No!” Steve was still yelling. “He already had a scrambler! You’re killing him!”

“It was just a sleep aid,” Maria told him calmly. Behind her, a team had produced a hovering stretcher from one of the corridors and had begun to strap Bucky in, despite him being limp as could be. “Now I suggest you stop trying to fight us before you get the same.”

“Try me!” Steve spat, but no attempt of his to wrestle out of his captor’s grip got him any closer to freedom.

Maria squinted at the side of his head, which must surely have still been smeared with blood even if the syntho-skin had done its job and closed the wound.

“I have some questions first,” she said, holding up a finger for the team that looked ready to depart with Bucky in tow. “But it appears they’ll have to wait. I take it you want to go with him, yes?”

Steve drooped. “Yes,” he answered. He wanted it more than anything, though if he was being honest he had expected it to require more of a fight.

“Will you go civilly?”

“Only if your guys do the same,” he shot back.

Maria made a motion for Steve to be let down. “They’re agents,” she corrected as he brushed himself off. “Now go. But leave your bag with us. You’ll get your possessions back after they pass through security.”

He didn’t need telling twice, thinking nothing of shouldering off his knapsack into the arms of the man who had just been manhandling him and sprinting off after the stretcher. He jogged along beside it to keep up, paying no attention to the twists of narrow hallways or the way cave walls gave way to concrete and paint, or the agents ahead of and behind him. Maria brought up the back, issuing prep orders for the neuro-med division into a wrist communicator. Even with his background in the stuff, Steve only understood one word out of every five, but from what he could decipher they really were going to do as Natasha had said.

After a series of white double doors, a hand on Steve’s shoulder kept him from following Bucky any further.

“He’s in good hands,” the dark skinned man from earlier assured him. “You can see him again in a bit. Your stop’s this way.”

“I feel fine, honest,” Steve tried to argue, but the man just fixed him with a doubting look.

“No offense, man, but you don’t look it,” he replied. “Romanoff said your name was Steve, right?” he added when Steve didn’t appear to buy it. “I’m Sam. Come on, Doc Banner is a real sweet guy. He’ll get you squared away in two shakes and trust me, your friend isn’t going anywhere in that time. What’d’ya say?”

Steve glanced back at the doors Bucky and the others had disappeared through just in time to see them swing shut and the light on a panel in the wall beside them to switch from green to red.

“Promise you’ll take me to him after?” he said.

“You got my word,” Sam said, holding out a hand.

Steve shook it, surprised at first by the firm grip. “Okay,” he agreed. “Let’s see Dr. Banner.”

Dr. Banner was a kindly looking man in his mid forties. Sam left Steve alone in the room with him, saying he’d be right outside when they were through, and showed himself out. Dr. Banner smiled in the manner of someone unused to making conversation.

“I feel fine, really,” Steve repeated to him.

“Sometimes a shower and a good night’s rest is all you really need,” Dr. Banner agreed. “But we have to take your vitals for the sake of the facility database.”

He motioned for Steve to have a seat in the examination chair, who took it and smiled guiltily at the datajack in Dr. Banner’s hand.

“Afraid you’ll have to do it the old fashioned way,” he confessed, pulling the scarf down in the back to show the unmarked skin of his neck.

Dr. Banner’s eyebrows shot up, but his expression didn’t otherwise change. “That’s not something you see every day,” he covered with a chuckle. “Guess they didn’t break you out of the Labs, then.”

“No,” Steve said as Dr. Banner strapped a blood pressure cuff to him. “Do... do people break out of the Labs often? I thought once you went in, you never come back.”

“That’s the case most of the time,” Dr. Banner replied before pausing to count heartbeats, eyes fixed on the clock. After fifteen seconds, he let the air flow out and tapped something into his tablet. “But sometimes our agents get the chance to help people get out. We have at least a couple hundred escapees living down here with us. Mostly the Betas that got experimented on like myself, but sometimes they manage to intercept Epsilon or criminal caravans, too, before they—you know...”

“Does that mean—” Steve’s breath was caught in his throat. He had to force himself to slow down and inhale deeper. “Is there—You said there was a database. If I knew someone that was taken...”

“Blood relative?” Dr. Banner asked.

Steve nodded. “One of them is.”

“Well that one’s easy,” he replied, pushing himself back on his rolling chair to the counter. He pulled a small, plastic rectangle out of one of the draws and wheeled himself back. “We can start that search now. Finger?”

Steve held out a hand. The doctor pressed the rectangle to the tip of his index finger, and a small prick later the clear center filled with a drop or two of blood. Dr. Banner spun around and plugged it into his computer.

“That’ll run for a while,” he said. “If you got a relative in this facility, we’ll find them. Um...” He motioned to him expectantly.

“Steve.”

“Steve,” he repeated, like he was processing an unusual fact.

The rest of the physical went by quick enough. Steve had his temperature taken, his height and weight logged, lungs listened to, more blood drawn. Dr. Banner’s frown deepened with every successive test, until at the end of it all he sat back, clapped his hands to his thighs, and sighed.

“Well,” he said, like he was looking for a bright side to it all. “It’s nothing we can’t treat.”

Steve forced a smile. “Nothin’ I didn’t already know about,” he replied. “‘Cept for the concussion, of course. Thanks for that, doctor.”

Dr. Banner answered with a tight smile. Before he could say anything more, their attention was diverted to a startling knock on the door.

“That’s odd,” Dr. Banner said, and stood to go an answer it.

On the other side was one of the biggest men Steve had ever seen. He didn’t so much tower over Dr. Banner as he did overshadow him with his mere presence. Just by virtue of stepping into the room he became the center of it. In his hand was the small metal briefcase Natasha had delivered, and when he turned his gaze on Steve, he did so with a single eye; the other was patched over.

“Sorry to interrupt,” he said to Dr. Banner, though it wasn’t an apology. “Do you have a minute?” It was not a request. “We found it.”

Dr. Banner’s eyes darted down to the briefcase. “Oh,” he said, and then, “oh, yes, of course. We were actually just finished.”

Steve took that as a sign that he should get himself out of the examination chair. The tall, dark man took a step out of the way to let Steve edge out the door, never taking his eye off him. More shaken than he would be willing to admit, Steve gave the doctor a farewell nod and quietly pulled the door closed behind him.

“I know that look,” Sam smiled, pushing himself to his feet from one of the chairs lining the hall. “Director Fury has that effect on people when he first meets them.”

“I think,” Steve breathed. “I think I’ve heard his voice before.”

“You might of,” Sam shrugged, turning back the way they’d come and waving for Steve to follow. “He does the broadcasts for the Underground.”

Steve hurried to fall in step with him. “The what?”

“The Underground!” Sam exclaimed. “The Uprisings may have failed, but the idea didn’t _go away_. I mean, obviously, otherwise we wouldn’t be here, right?” He chuckled. “It’s an information network. To be honest, I didn’t think anyone was still tuning in, but we can’t just up and risk leaving those that are in the dark, now can we? I’d imagine it gives people hope.”

The source of the voice clicked into place so suddenly the earth beneath Steve’s feet seemed to shift with it. “The radio broadcasts,” he breathed.

“The very ones,” Sam smiled as he placed his hand on a scanner beside the set of double doors he’d barred Steve from passing through earlier. The doors slid right open, letting through a bustle of distant conversation too low to make out.

The next thing Steve asked was a question he’d been trying to puzzle out his entire life. “How does he know when there’s a new Mandate coming?”

“Oh, we have ways,” Sam laughed. “Hacky, sneaky ways. Personally? I’d just rather not know the details. All the sneaking around shit has never been my cup of tea. I’m here to fight when the time comes for it. I’ll leave the rest to the experts.”

Steve returned his smile. There was a certain relief that came with finding someone on the same wavelength.

“So, this place is like a headquarters for the Resistance?”

“SHIELD,” Sam corrected. “But yeah, more or less. We have some backup satellite bases in some other parts of the country, but this is the brain center of it. The founders practically carved this place out of the rock themselves.”

Looking around the ordinary, white hallway, Steve would never have guessed they were situated in a network of tunnels at all.

“I’ve always dreamed a place like this existed,” he marveled. “I grew on on stories from before the war. I was always convinced there must be people still out there who believed, but... I never thought it would be anything as big as this.”

For the first time, a frown passed across Sam’s features. “You’d be surprised how small it feels when you’ve been cooped up in it your whole life,” he replied.

“I know a little of what that’s like,” Steve told him, rubbing the back of his neck. “Hiding out, trying to live your life through films.”

“Wondering if the sky is really as big as the photographs make it out to be,” Sam added knowly, smiling at whatever it was he was picturing from behind his eyelids.

As they passed through another set of secured double doors, the voices that had been a little over a low rumble suddenly echoed clearly from behind the door at the very end of the hall.

“You know my terms,” a man’s voice was saying stubbornly. “I don’t care if he’s got the Hubble mark IV mounted to his head.”

“You’re not really in any place to be negotiating with us,” Maria’s voice replied, just as Sam and Steve stepped into the room.

Compared to the cozy little examination room Steve had been in with Dr. Banner, this place was cavernous. It was filled with all manner of machines and screens unlike any medical equipment Steve had ever seen, but none of it interested him because at the center of it all, strapped into a sprawling metal chair, was Bucky. His eyes were shut and his head was lulled to the side to make room for a datajack protruding from the other side.

There were several other agents in the room, all busy with the machines. Maria stood by Bucky’s side, arms crossed and lips pursed, across from a man leaning casually against one of the control panels despite his wrists being linked by magnetized cuffs. Steve recognized him at once.

“Aren’t I?” Anthony Stark asked with a quirk of his brow. “Cause it looks to me like you’re asking for my help. I mean, let’s face it, I’m the best person for the job, no arguing with that. You’re right to come to me, except for, you know, the whole kidnapping me and keeping me locked in your cave thing. That sort of arrangement tends to leave some hard feelings.”

“I wasn’t asking,” Maria told him before turning to the new additions to the room. “What is he doing here? He’s supposed to be taken to quarters after his physical” she said to Sam.

“Oh right, that’s what I was forgetting,” Sam replied, his tone suggesting he hadn’t forgotten at all, and Steve took the cue to quickly make his way to Bucky’s side before he could be forced out. To his great relief, Bucky was still warm to the touch, though not responsive.

“Did you remove the scrambler?” he asked before Maria could even open her mouth to tell any of them off.

“Yes,” she said, smiling through her teeth and turning back to Stark. “As for the rest of it...”

“No terms, no dice,” Stark shrugged. “I’m being very nice about this. Aren’t I being very nice about this?” he asked Steve. “All things considered, it’s the least she can do.”

He wasn’t at all what Steve had always imagined Howard Stark’s genetic breakthrough to be. Granted, this wasn’t at all the place he expected to meet the first Alpha in the world, either.

“What are his terms?” he asked.

“I want to install my own interface into their system,” Stark answered, looking at Maria as if Steve wasn’t even there.

“And you would pass up the chance to examine the Winter Soldier just over that?” she asked.

“Who else are you going to get to fix him?” Stark smirked. “Or no, sorry, not fix him. You just want to strip-datamine him until there’s nothing left.”

“No one is datamining Bucky!” Steve interjected.

“Not unless I get my interface,” Stark added.

“Not ever!”

“Enough,” Maria said. She paused and heaved an exasperated sigh. “Just... be quick about it,” she grit to Stark. “It’s a closed system, so if you’re trying to get word to the outside, you can forget about it.”

“Hadn’t even crossed my mind,” Stark lied through a smile, already pulling the datajack out from the control panel.

“You can’t let him datamine Bucky,” Steve warned her.

“He’s not,” Maria replied in a tone that suggested she was well on the way to the edge of her patience, watching as Stark plugged himself into their system and grinned smugly as the installation files transferred. “The Labs’ malware is a tricky beast, but if anyone can find a way to extract it, it’s Tony Stark.”

Steve raised an eyebrow. “Tony?”

“You’d be surprised how quickly the Alpha-Anthony joke gets old,” the man himself told him.

“He’s technically an Alpha minus by today’s standards,” Maria added under her breath.

“Heard that,” Tony chimed. “But don’t worry your pretty Gamma head, sweetheart. What I lack in speed and muscle I can make up for with pure intellect, though a little engineering genius also goes a long way.”

Overhead, the speakers in the room crackled.

“Speak of the devil. That you, Jarvis?” Tony called.

“I’m here, sir,” a man’s synthesized voice answered from the ceiling.

Maria took a step forward. “An AI? This was not part of the terms.”

“Jarvis is my interface,” Tony said matter-of-factly, holding up his bound wrists. “Now, if you would let me do my job.”

She shot him a glare that could have easily melted the flesh off less arrogant men, but pressed a button on her wrist communicator all the same. Tony’s restraints snapped apart with a quiet hiss. The first thing he did was crack his knuckles and roll his neck.  

“Great, let’s take a look then, shall we?” he decided, circling around the chair. “The Winter Soldier. And here I thought you were just a bedtime story to keep little boys and girls in their beds at night. I’ll admit, I thought you’d be more threatening.”

“He has a name,” Steve growled. He didn’t like the way Tony looked at Bucky one bit, like he was something that could be disassembled into its component parts.

“I’m sure it did, once,” Tony replied. “Alright, Jarvis. Show me what this guy’s made of.”

“Right away, sir,” the voice replied, and even as it spoke the readouts from Bucky’s cybernetic ran themselves down the nearest screen.

Steve was on his feet at once, blocking his view of at least the bottom few rows. “You don’t get to talk about him that way,” he told Tony. “Nobody does.”

Tony looked down his nose at him. “What are you supposed to be, Jiminy Cricket?”

“I’m his—” Steve didn’t know _what_ he was. “—friend.”

“How touching,” Tony mumbled, pushing past him. “Can I get a full neural map projected. Right about there.”

“Yes, sir,” the robotic voice replied. The air in the vicinity of where Tony was gesturing shimmered blue and reformed itself into tangled web of different colored strings. It took Steve a moment to realize the mass formed the shape of a human brain.

Still, he wouldn’t let himself be pushed aside that easily. “Hey!” he started, but Maria took him by the shoulder before he could put himself in Tony’s way again. He jerked himself free and shot his glare at her instead.

“Stark is the world’s expert in biotech integration and the best chance your friend has,” she told him quietly. Steve grit his teeth, but before he could jump to a third option, Tony made an intrigued hum.

“Oh, that’s interesting,” he said, turning back to the chair.

Steve’s whole body tensed for a fight as he reached down to touch the metal arm, but all he did was turn the wrist so Bucky’s palm faced upward. With his free hand, he motioned the map closer and tapped one of the colored strands when it was within reach.

The effect was immediate. Bucky’s whole body convulsed, eyes flying open with a gasp as he arched against his restraints. Steve was back at his side at once. The look Bucky gave him was nothing short of that of a cornered animal when Steve touched him, but the attention was only momentary before his gaze snapped to Tony on his other side.

One of the plates on Bucky’s wrist was flipped upward. Tony peered underneath and grinned.

“Jarvis,” he said. “Section me off a cyber-neuro simulation. I want it air-tight.”

“I strongly caution against this, sir,” the voice replied.

“I’m hearing your word of caution, and I’m choosing to ignore it,” Tony sang. “Where’s that sim?”

“If you _insist_ , sir,” the voice replied with what sounded strangely like impatience. Another monitor went blank, only to immediately be replaced by another three-dimensional model of a brain, this one mostly hollow. A cybernetic port jutted out of the base.

“What are you—” Maria began, but her question was answered when Tony reached underneath the flipped up plate and pulled out something on a wire.

Her jaw immediately dropped open. Steve blinked, surprised he hadn’t put it together himself. Bucky took one look at it and dropped his head back, resigning his eyes to the ceiling.

“That’s unplugged,” Sam muttered.

“It’s a datajack,” Maria realized. “Mounted to a person. How could that—”

“Agent Hill,” Tony said. “A jack-to-jack adapter, if you would.”

“Not until you tell me exactly what that thing is going to do to our systems,” she replied, reining herself in.

“That’s a question for him,” Tony said, pointing the jack at Bucky. “But I doubt you’ll get anything useful given that the answer isn’t even in his brain. My best guess?” he shrugged. “A Trojan, probably. Camouflaged spyware, plus something to damage the systems when it has what it needs, and wipe any sign it was ever there. At least, that’s what I would use if I wanted to create an untraceable assassin.”

“Assassin?” Steve choked, but nobody was paying him the least bit of mind.

“What makes you think I would let you uplink something like that?” Maria scoffed.

“I can assure you, ma’am, the simulation is completely self-contained,” Jarvis added helpfully from the ceiling. “Your systems will remain untouched. You have my word.”

“Oh, well if I have your word,” Maria repeated, clearly unswayed.

“Then take mine,” Tony said. “Cause the only way you’re ever going to know what’s in this thing,” he patted Bucky’s arm, “is if you let me take it for a test drive.”

Maria’s lip curled, but she appeared to be considering it. Steve looked back to Bucky, who looked less present than ever. At least running a scrambler there had been a vague look of confusion across his features. Now, there was just nothing; he was blank. For one terrifying second, the notion swept across Steve’s mind that maybe the Bucky he knew didn’t survive the Labs after all.

“Seal off the neuro-medbay,” Maria decided before that thought could go any farther.  “I want us disconnected from the network completely. And get this man his adapter.”

Agents scrambled. Tony swung the jack from Bucky’s arm by the cord and whistled.

“Friend, huh?” he asked Steve, looking down at the way Steve’s hands brushed a stray strand of sweat-slick hair from Bucky’s face.

Steve narrowed his eyes at him. “Just hurry up and get him back,” he spat.

Tony held up his hands in mock surrender. “Wow, touchy,” he said, just as a woman approached them with the adapter Tony had asked for. “About time,” he sighed, accepting it and returning the woman a wink. “Thanks, doll.”

The cord for the datajack in Bucky’s arm was surprisingly long. It must have been coiled up and down the length of it to fit, but the upside was that it stretched to the machine holding the simulation.

“Ready?” Tony asked the ceiling, both the machine’s and Bucky’s cords in his hands.

“When you are, sir,” the voice replied.

All eyes turned to the monitor. Without further ado, Tony formed the final connection. Bucky tensed, sucking air in through his teeth, as the coolant system in his arm shifted into overdrive. Steve’s grip on his shoulder tightened. On the screen, a tiny blue blip representing a file traveled up the cybernetic implant and installed itself in the cerebellum with little more than a small flash in the area of the brain where short-term memories were formed. Then, nothing. Tony pulled the cords apart and Bucky let out his breath.

“Installed itself like a worm and cleaned up the mess,” Tony narrated with a theatrical flourish of his arms.

“Yes, but what is it doing now?” Maria asked.

If the readouts of the screen were anything to go by, the answer was very little. The light showing the bug’s position was still.

“The program is awaiting activation instruction,” Jarvis clarified.

“What kind of instruction?” Tony asked.

“The current version is programmed to respond to a specific audio stimulus,” Jarvis replied, highlighting a section of the temporal lobe. “However, the code appears to be easily modified to specify other activation commands.”

“It’s tailored to the assignment,” Maria realized.

Tony leaned forward against the control board. “Run it,” he said.

“As you wish, sir,” Jarvis obliged. Now there was definitely an edge of sarcasm in its tone. Steve was starting to side with Maria on the fact that this was more AI than interface.

He didn’t have time to think on it further, however, because a moment later the sim’s temporal lobe lit up in blotches that spread throughout the rest of the projection. Everyone in the room collectively held their breath as the chain reaction bounced in waves of firing synapses. Steve’s fingers, meanwhile, found the diagnostic interface’s datajack in the back of Bucky’s neck. His eyes were on the screen, but his attention was elsewhere. Whatever this thing would do, he wanted Bucky uplinked nowhere near it. The synapses worked their way down to the hindbrain. Steve pulled the plug. The lights on the screen met. The screen went black.

 _Every_ screen went black. The lights overhead flickered erratically and died out, plunging the room into darkness before the emergency generator took over a fraction of a second later. Bucky barely even blinked.

“What’s happening?” Maria demanded. “You said it was secure!”

Tony barely seemed to hear her. “Jarvis?” he shouted at the ceiling. “Jarvis!”

For several long, terrifying seconds, the speakers issued only static. Then, just as suddenly as they had gone out, the lights one by one returned to their full power and the screens began to restart.

“S-s-sorry about that, sir,” the robotic voice said, the synthesizers glitching and shattering the illusion that the voice could belong to anything human. “That was nothing to worry about. I shut your system down myself to protect it. The program is contained.”

“Show me the simulation again,” Tony ordered hurriedly.

The brain flickered back on screen. It showed no damage, but the cerebellum glowed faintly blue.

“Muscle coordination,” Steve realized. “It can use the body as a puppet.”

“It can stop a heart,” Maria continued for him. “Organ failure, stroke... the list is endless.”

“It can make a murder look like an accident,” Tony hissed under his breath, grip tightening on the console. His knuckles were ashen. “Can it be uninstalled?”

“I’m engineering a way as we speak,” Jarvis assured.

“Good,” Tony huffed, pushing himself off the controls and turning to pace around the whole setup. His demeanor had shifted entirely, cocky attitude evaporated into thin air. “Once you got it, run it on anything and everything in this guy’s head. Let’s see if somebody back at the Labs got lazy with their uninstall mechanics.”

Steve knew the next thing Jarvis would say before he said, but no matter how quickly he scrambled for the datajack, it wasn’t fast enough.

“I’m afraid I can’t do that, sir,” the robotic voice said. “Barnes, J. has been disconnected.”

Everyone looked over in time to see Steve uplink Bucky back in.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Maria asked him.

“You were just going to leave him connected to that worm?” Steve shot back. “You saw how that secure simulation turned out.”

The woman sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose. “You’re not even authorized to be in here. Perhaps you should let Sam show you to quarters.” The look she gave Sam said this wasn’t a suggestion but an order. Steve, however, was not prepared to go without digging his heels into the ground.

“I want to stay with Bucky,” he demanded.

“Then we’ll let you know once we have him back,” she replied in a tone that ended a conversation and was not to be argued with.

Steve did it anyway. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“I would love some privacy, actually,” Tony chimed in.

“Oh for the love of—” Maria sighed. “Fine. Clear the room. Everybody out.

“But don’t forget, Stark,” she added over Steve’s cut off protests. As the agents filed past her to the door, she pointed to the upper corners of the room, where black plastic bubbles served as cover for what could only be surveillance cameras. “We’ll be watching.”

“I would be insulted if you didn’t,” Tony grinned tightly before giving his back to them to consult his map of Bucky’s brain. The last glimpse Steve got before Sam pulled him out the door was Tony reaching forward to touch another one of the colored strands.

As the door closed, the screams began.

**  
**  
  
  
  


It wasn’t the first time Bucky snuck out of bed, creeping through the silent house, step by carefully memorized step to keep the floorboards from giving him away; it wasn’t the first time he crawled into Steve’s bed and heard his sleepy sigh when the shifting mattress woke him, wiggling himself closer to the wall to make room; it wasn’t the first time they fell asleep together in a tangle of boyish limbs, but on this night it would be the last.

Steve would never forget the sound of the front door splintering. It was like a crack of thunder, like a gunshot, like the earth splitting in two. He sat bolt upright, his heart in his throat, and in the same instant Bucky jerked awake beside him. It was sunrise, or just past. The glow of it painted the room pale white from around the curtains.

The floor shook with footsteps from below. They boys looked at each other, frozen. They knew but they had never believed that this moment would come. It wasn’t something that could happen—not to them, not to their families, not to this house. It had to be a bad dream.

But bad dreams end, and this did not.

The door cracked open, quickly and force. Steve would have gasped but the air caught and he had to clap his hands over his mouth to keep from coughing. It was only his father. There was a gun in his hand.

It took the man a second to register there were two boys in the room instead of one. One second, and then his mask was back on—the expression he wore when there was someone dying on his operating table. Business. Cold. Detached. When he spoke, you listened. No time for questions.

But he didn’t speak, not this time. He waved for the floor under the bed and shut the door again. Locked it.

Bucky was the first to drop to the floor. Steve’s couldn’t inhale hard enough to fill his lungs. It was like a bad dream. It had to be a bad dream.

Footsteps pattering down the stairs. Gunshots. Shouts. It made it difficult for Steve to count his breaths.

“Come on,” Bucky hissed. “Steve, move!”

Steve moved, but not for the floor. His heart was roaring in his ears. His lungs were receding into points. His fingers shook as they wrapped around the bat leaning innocently against his bed. The door felt like it was growing more distant, the room stretching, the world tunneling.

He tried to say something, he didn’t remember what. He had to go, that much was of the utmost importance. He had to help. He had to fight, and he had to breathe. Hiding was not an option.

“Steve,” Bucky begged him.

He was a voice, a grip on Steve’s shoulders. Everything else was getting fuzzy around the edges. The world was going dark.

Steve lifted the bat, or maybe he only tried. He shook his head and the world was slow to follow. He couldn’t hide; he couldn’t breathe.

“Steve, this is unplugged!” Bucky was saying, somewhere very far away. “Get under the bed, come on, hurry!”

His chest felt too small, squeezing the air right out before he could suck it in. He took a step. The room tipped sideways, into Bucky’s chest. They were both on the floor and Steve had no recollection of how they got there. Darkness pulsed around the edges of his eyes. Cold sweat beaded on the back of his neck. His fingers closed and there was no bat there. One of Bucky’s sisters screamed.

Bucky froze, looked to the door, looked to the bat. Steve tried to stand, tried to breathe, tried to fight.

“Your medicine,” Bucky whispered. “Come _on_.”

He had to pull him. Everything was closing in, shrinking into a singularity.

Pick the floorboard. Pull the switch. Slide the wall. Ignore the screaming.

“Go,” Bucky growled, shoving Steve into the hole, and Steve had to choice but to crawl forward. Or maybe Bucky pushed him. Or maybe they managed it together.

He found the medicine box, but he couldn’t get it open. He could barely sit up but he had to if Bucky would fit inside with him. Sapping the last of his strength, he squeezed himself into his corner. Hands kept pushing him, deeper, deeper. He tried to make himself smaller. He had to fit, so Bucky could.

He got the box open, and Bucky’s hands were there to help him—help him fit the medicine inside, help him got the headgear on, help him breathe.

He breathed. The medicine was so cold it stung but he sucked it in anyway. His hand groped for the flashlight, and when he couldn’t find it, for Bucky.

But the space beside him was empty. He tried turned his head to see why, and the screw that jut from the wall behind his head caught the strap and kept him held in place. There was no Bucky. There was just an empty space.

“I don’t think I can fit anymore,” Bucky’s voice came with a hollow chuckle. He was lying on his stomach, squeezed just half inside. “But don’t worry, I’ll be back. Stay here.”

And then, just like that, he was gone.

The door burst open with a crack.

“I’m warning you,” Bucky yelled. “I don’t go down easy!”

Steve tried to yell, to thrash, to call his name, but the bit between his teeth that kept him breathing kept him strapped to the wall and voiceless. There was no room to kick, no room to move, no room to think. He was trapped and useless and the space only grew smaller, smaller, smaller. The ceiling shrunk, the walls contracted. There were screws in the walls and blood on his hands.

Bucky died screaming, and with a sickening squelch. Steve did nothing to stop it. He didn’t even say goodbye.

**  
**  
  
  


_Temporary quarters,_ Maria had called it, but Steve knew a furnished prison cell when he saw one. If it was meant to make him regret breaking that agent’s nose in his struggle to get back into the neuro-medbay, it failed at its job miserably. If it was meant to keep him from leaving—well, Steve wasn’t about to let it succeed just yet.

When banging on the door didn’t even get him a response, he turned to other means. There was nothing with which to pick the lock. There were no structural faults in the door itself. The air duct was scarcely large enough to fit his arm into. Nothing would give, or budge, or break.

He paced, and then he sat on the cot, and then he lay and stared at the ceiling as if he could glare a hole straight through to the surface. There wasn’t much of a plan, so to speak. He’d get out, he’d find his way back to the neuro-medbay, he’d find Bucky. If he happened upon Tony Stark he’d probably sock him in the jaw for good measure, but that was secondary. Get Bucky, get out. The rest he could figure out later.

One minute he was closing his eyes to think, and the next he was jerking awake to a knock on the door. He scrambled to his feet just as the door opened and Natasha stepped inside with a tray and a knapsack.

“Sorry to interrupt your beauty rest,” she said, mirthfully eyeing Steve’s sleep-stuck hair. “But something’s come up.”

Steve’s stomach sank. “Is it Bucky?”

“No, he’s doing very well, actually,” she replied, setting down the tray. It was the standard protein wafer ration and multivitamins. She dropped the knapsack down on the bed. “He’s in recovery. You, however, need to eat, wash, and get dressed. They’re waiting. Your clothes are all here.”

“Who is they?” Steve asked before he threw back the vitamins.

“You’ll see,” she said on her way out the door. “I’ll be right outside. Hurry up, Banner’s scan found something.”

“Banner’s—” Steve nearly dropped the glass. “He found my father?”

“Something like that,” Natasha said, and closed the door.

Something like that. Steve scrubbed his face in the sink as quickly as he could. Something like that! He couldn’t stop repeating it to himself. Was it his father or wasn’t it? He didn’t have any other family, not that he knew of. A day ago he didn’t even think he had his father, but if Bucky had come back, maybe it wasn’t an impossibility. The thought opened a gnawing pit inside Steve’s stomach that had nothing to do with hunger. Would he recognize him? What was he supposed to say? Would he know what became of the rest of Bucky’s family?

Steve threw on a clean change of clothes and tightened his scarf in the mirror. His hair wouldn’t lie flat, but was as good as he was going to get. He didn’t have the patience for anything else. He shoved the protein wafer in his mouth and shouldered his way out the door.

“Ready,” he said past the lump of wheat in his throat.

Natasha returned a smile and a nod and started down the hallway without a word. Steve jogged to catch up to her.

“How’s your, uh... husband?” he asked after they turned the corner.

“He’s had worse,” she smirked. “And he’s not my husband.”

“Oh,” Steve said. “Sorry, I wasn’t sure. He said—”

“It’s fine,” she said like she would rather he dropped the subject. Her voice was still hard when she asked, “Steve, how much did you know about your grandfather?”

“My...” the question caught him off guard. He was more than reasonably certain that all of his grandparents were dead. “He lived with us for a while, but he died when I was little. I don’t remember him very much.”

Natasha frowned. “And your other grandfather?”

“The one I was named after? I never met him. I think he died before my father was born, during the Uprising. The only thing my father knew about him that I know of was that he was the one that had picked out his name.”

“And what name was that?” Natasha asked.

Steve shrugged. It was only the most common boy’s name, so to him it held no significance. “James.”

Natasha kept her eyes fixed straight ahead. “Steve, tell me something, “ she said. “If your last name isn’t Carter, what is it?”

“It’s—” something he was told never to tell anyone, nor ever to say aloud. It was a big, important secret, even if no one ever gave him a straight answer when he asked the reason. He didn’t see the use in keeping it much longer. “—Rogers, why?”

“I thought so,” Natasha said, and walked on.

“Wait,” he called after her, and fell back into step. “Does that mean something to you?”

“Depends,” she replied. “Does the name Captain America mean anything to you?”

Steve couldn’t help but chuckle. “Yeah, so does Santa Claus and Paul Bunyan, why?”

She didn’t answer him, in part because they had arrived. Natasha lay her hand on the security scanner and the doors parted into a room significantly smaller than one one Bucky had was being treated in, though no less packed with machinery.

Natasha hadn’t lied when she said people were waiting. The first person Steve’s attention was drawn to was Director Fury himself, standing beside a lab table on which rested the metal briefcase he had had with him the last time Steve had seen him. On his other side was a clearly uncomfortable Dr. Banner, and the only person in the room to smile at Steve when he entered, no matter how much the smile looked unsettlingly like an apologetic grimace. Tony was there, too, though he was seated rigidly on the opposite end of the table, wrists magnetized to the back of a metal chair and a datajack hanging from his neck, looking thoroughly uncooperative.

“Glad you could join us,” Fury said as Natasha went up to join his side. “It’s Steve, is it? Have a seat.”

He motioned to something that looked very much like a dentist’s chair on the other side of the room.

“I think I’d rather stay standing,” Steve told him.

“Have it your way,” Fury shrugged, and turning to the metal case, continued. “Steve, do you know what single object would be so important that High Commander Schmidt would authorize the Winter Soldier to protect its transport?”

Steve didn’t understand what this had to do with him in the slightest, but he went along with it anyway.

“His name is Bucky,” he corrected, for a start.

“Bucky then,” Fury replied. “The question still stands.”

Steve looked to all the people in the room for some clue, but they all appeared to be waiting for him to answer. Tony only rolled his eyes.

“I don’t know,” he admitted at last.

He watched as Fury cracked the clasps keeping the metal briefcase closed. What he pulled out was a clear glass cylinder filled with some kind of suspension gel, and at the center of it, a scrap of metal.

“We have very good reason to believe that this,” he said, “is the bullet that killed Captain America, and that the blood still on it is his.”

Steve blinked at him. He didn’t follow. “Do you have the knife that killed that the Easter Bunny in there, too?” he asked.

No one found the remark particularly funny except for Tony, who snorted soundlessly. Steve figured the datajack in his port must have been keeping his vocal cords numbed.

“We’re serious, Steve” Natasha chimed in. “Captain America was a real person, and the war he fought in was a real war.”

“Okay,” Steve agreed slowly, though he didn’t buy a word. “So?”

“You’d like to know why we’re telling you this,” Fury guessed.

“Might be helpful,” Steve replied when it became apparent he wasn’t just pausing for breath.

Instead of explaining, however, Fury asked, “what do you know about the story of Captain America, exactly?”

Steve hesitated. He didn’t have cause to believe this was a trick, but under a regime where even knowing stories that were meant to be erased was a crime, much less telling them, he had grounds to be weary. But it hadn’t stopped a lot of people, his parents included, and it wouldn’t stop him. Shoving his hands in his pockets, he shrugged.

“Epsilon turned Alpha, or whatever the equivalent back then was,” he recalled. “Which, I mean,  is impossible, or at least I thought it was until this morning. Other than that... War hero, beacon of hope, et cetera, et cetera.”

If he sounded bitter, it was because he was. He had every reason to be. The story had been whispered to him as a child like a secret of the greatest importance. He had once had memorized by heart every detail of the hero’s escapades in his fight against the eugenic forces of a mythic land. For a child whom the government had deemed unworthy of life, that meant something. There was someone out there fighting, someone who stood a chance, someone whom the government feared enough to erase because even the idea of him was a threat.

It was a hope to help scared little children sleep at night, but sooner or later those children grow up. There was power in symbols, yes, but there was no magic serum, no glimmering heroics, no righteous fight against a continually insurmountable evil out here in the real world. In the end, all of it was just a dressed up lie.

“Anyway, in the version I know, he wasn’t shot,” Steve finished. “He went down with his airship at sea. Froze to death, I imagine, if he didn’t die on impact.”

“Then you only know half the story,” Fury replied. “He did go down with his ship, centuries ago, but he didn’t die on impact and he certainly didn’t freeze to death. He froze, yes, but when they found that ship of his melting out of the ice a year or so before the Uprisings began, he was already gone.”

“Dead bodies tend to do that,” Steve offered in response. “Decompose, you know. Happens.”

“Oh, there were bodies on that plane,” Fury assured, stubbornly patient. “Just not his. They searched the ice for miles around, and the only trace of him they found was a single footprint—fresh—left by a boot that hadn’t seen the production line in two hundred years.”

Steve shook his head in disbelief. “So you expect me to believe that he just thawed and, and... got himself shot?”

“Got himself shot,” Natasha chuckled dryly. “Steve, he lead the Uprisings. He started a revolution, a civil war.”

“And,” Fury added, “it just so happens he had a kid when no one was looking.”

“You can’t be—” Steve began, but if Directory Fury was anything, he was serious. “You expect me to believe that?”

“He was hiding under the name Carter when Clint and I found him,” Natasha added helpfully.

“Of course he was,” Fury sighed. “And no,” he said, turning to Steve. “I don’t expect you to believe a word.

“But I do expect you to believe the facts,” he said as Steve opened his mouth to complain.

With that, he fitted the glass cylinder into a slot on the table. The base glowed red as a sensor scanned the gel, and a moment later twenty-three pairs of faded chromosomes appeared on the left side of the screen behind it. Or rather, what was left of twenty-three pairs. Time had definitely left its mark, eroding entire sections.

“Doctor,” Fury prompted.

Dr. Banner pressed a button on his tablet, and a second set of genes—this one complete—joined the screen to the right of the first.

“That set is yours,” Fury told Steve, and then to Banner, “run the comparison.”

Banner did. On screen, the computer quickly isolated the segments of DNA that varied between individuals. A loading bar scrawled across the bottom as chunks of amino acid pairs began to light up in quick succession, and by the time it reached the end, a good quarter of the genes on on both sides of the screen were highlighted, at least of the number that hadn’t been decayed by time.

Steve’s eyes darted between the screen and Natasha. “My grandfather,” he said, somewhere between a statement and a question.

“There’s a reason James became such a popular name after the Uprisings,” she explained. “All the names of the revolutionaries might have been banned, but there were at least three companions to Captain America in his previous life who had, of course, not survived to fight in this war: Falsworth, Morita, and Barnes. Whether one was the namesake or all of them, James is a codeword, a way of letting those who share knowledge of it to communicate their commitment to continuing the fight that began with the first Uprising fifty years ago.”

It was getting to be a bit too much to take in, but one piece of it stuck.

“Barnes?” Steve repeated.

“A coincidence,” Fury shrugged. “Or a very distant relative. It makes no difference to us. In fact, you being Cap’s grandson doesn’t make a huge difference either.”

Steve gaped. “Then why go through all this trouble?” he demanded, his voice too high to be his own.

Fury motioned to Banner, who with a series of commands isolated a single gene segment in two copies on screen. It was a gene both sets shared, though half of it was completely corrupted in the older of the two. Steve wasn’t versed enough in genetics to know what it controlled, but he didn’t need to be because Banner told him.

“It’s a rare sympathetic nervous system anomaly,” he explained. “Uncommon even during the Old Order, but marked as dangerous and systematically eradicated in the New. It’s been extinct for decades, or so we thought.”

“Which you can imagine made our jobs rather difficult when we discovered it was the linchpin that made Project: Rebirth possible in the first place,” Fury finished. “Although,” he added in response to the look of utter confusion painted across Steve’s face. “Perhaps we should work up to that. Stark?”

Natasha typed something into the unit beside Tony, sending him into a fit of coughing and sputtering.

“Honored to finally be allowed to join the conversation,” he rasped when he at last could. “Let me start with this: fuck you. And also you, and you. As for you,” he turned to Steve. “no, I don’t care. Your friend bites. So fuck you, too.”

“Eloquent,” Fury said. “As always. Anything else you have to say?”

“Oh, there’s more,” Tony assured him. “But I’m assuming you unmuzzled me for, what, a biology lesson?”

Fury nodded, and motioned for him to continue.

“I can’t believe this. Can you believe this?” Tony said, turning to Steve. “The nerve, honestly. They kidnap me just to pull this shit out of my head, and then they want me to read it to you. Can you really blame me for not having cyberneuro security protocols in place in the case of kidnapping by terrorists? That’s a bit much even for me, you have to admit.”

“That’s enough, Mr. Stark,” Fury butt in. “Dr. Banner, could you?”

Banner looked worriedly from Fury to Natasha to Stark, and only then to Steve.

“Well,” he admitted. “It’s true that we brought Stark here to extract a some files. He had them stored in his head, you see. It’s nothing personal. They are, well, illegal to have, frankly, so we couldn’t find them anywhere else. They’re Old Order research. We don’t know how his father got a hold of them, but we know he used them in his work prior to... well, to...”

“Me,” Tony interrupted. “Before he made me.” Then, realizing he was playing right into their hands by speaking, he clamped his mouth shut.

Banner continued. “They’re from what was most likely the world’s first instance of a postnatal gene modification,” he explained. “So you can see why Howard Stark would have wanted his hands on them. Unfortunately, the files in question are only a record of that work. The originals were never written down, so all the real calculations and formulas were lost when the would-be author, uh, met his untimely end.”

“The guy that penned the stuff we _do_ have had no idea what he was dabbling in, of course,” Tony cut in again, seemingly unable to keep quiet for any length of time. “I’d be surprised if this original author did either, unless he managed to invent retroviral therapy a hundred years early and then failed to tell literally anyone. I mean, yeah, he did invent it, technically, but he didn’t know he invented it. Sure woulda saved us all a lot of trouble thirty years down the line, let me tell you.”

“The papers do suggest a very... poor, shall we say, understanding of retroviruses,” Banner continued. “You know what a retrovirus is, right?”

Steve looked between the two of them, his brain still reeling to catch up. Tony, however, had no intention of pausing to let him process.

“You know what a virus is, at least, don’t you?” he asked. It was a rhetorical question. “Of course you do, everyone does. It’s just like the computer kind: it goes into the cell, it throws an orgy, cell explodes, a million new viruses spread to a million new cells. A retrovirus is the same thing, except instead of just multiplying, it writes itself into a cell’s DNA and has the cell do all the production work for it.”

“Which can be devastating,” Banner was quick to add.

“Unless done intentionally,” Tony continued. “And that’s where retroviral therapy comes in. See, we can use a retrovirus as a vector. Basically, we hack its genetic programming and make it seed a less malicious—beneficial even—segment of DNA. Or even remove DNA segments we don’t want. Genetic predispositions to cancers, diabetes, genetic disorders... it’s how Alphas are made. You know this.”

“Captain—uh, your grandfather was, allegedly, the first successful attempt at it,” Banner continued. “Some might even say the first Alpha, no offense.”

“None taken,” Tony shrugged. “Never cared for the title anyway. Besides, that’s how I read the papers, too. Once you strip out all the super serum bullshit the writer uses to make sense of what he saw, the procedure is all there. We call it ViRRT, nowadays. You’ve heard of that at least, haven’t you?”

Steve blinked. “I think so,” he guessed, not even entirely sure what they were talking about anymore. “ViRRT, that’s... Vita Ray Retroviral Therapy.” He’d read about it at some point, but it was far outside his area of expertise, most likely in the realm of Beta medicine. “Something to do with temporarily knocking out the immune system with photon radiation, right?”

“Close enough,” Tony said. “As far as retroviral therapies go, it’s about as archaic as you can get. They really went in with no holds barred back in the day, and for once I’m not exaggerating—shot gramps up with like two gallons of virus, a bit of penicillin to tide him over against opportunistic infections, and then they just popped him in the oven and crossed their fingers. He should have died by all rights, surprised he didn’t. Must have hurt like a bitch.”

“But it worked,” Steve finished for him. “Because... because of that?” He toward the genes projected on the screen.

“Yes,” Banner replied. “And no. What you’re looking at here is just one of the restriction sites that the retroviral DNA would have written itself into. A restriction site is like... like a sign that tells the virus, ‘insert here’. The, uh, the ‘serum’ as it’s called in the papers looks like it was actually a cocktail of retrovirals since there are a number of insertions in the genome, but this particular restriction site acted as a stabilizer for the whole process. So it didn’t help him survive the procedure so much as it... kept him sane and whole after the fact, as it were.”

“Records can be found numerous attempts to reproduce the success of the procedure on your grandfather,” Natasha added. “But in all cases the results were imperfect. We think the reason is that all those other subjects lacked this single genetic anomaly here.”

“Well what’s the anomaly?” Steve couldn’t help but ask.

Fury and Natasha looked to Banner, who could only shrug. On the other side of the room, Tony chuckled.

“What, you guys don’t see it?” he asked.

“Do enlighten us,” Fury replied.

“Ah, well.” Tony straightened himself up as far as he could with his wrists still held firmly in place. He smirked at Fury, clearly enjoying the one moment he had in a position of power over the others.

“The good doctor over here was on track when he said it had to do with the sympathetic nervous system,” he said at last, having dragged on his pause long enough. “Specifically, it’s a defect in the flight response half of the equation. You’re all fight, no flight, Churchill.

“No? Not even chuckle?” he added when Steve did nothing but raise an eyebrow at him. “ _We shall fight on the beaches_ , nothing? I’m not going to explain the joke. I draw the line at explaining the joke. The point is: you have it, grandpa had it, if there’s anyone that can make it all work again, it’s you.”

“Wait a second,” Steve said, only now at last starting to put the whole thing together. “What do you mean make it work?”

“We were getting to that,” Fury interjected, turning to Steve. “Yes, we do intend to make it work. We know the Labs are close to finding their own breakthrough, and when they do we’ll have an army on our hands that doesn’t need over two decades to mature like prenatal Alphas do. We might not be able to match them in terms of sheer number but—”

“I’ll do it,” Steve said before he could finish.

“You don’t even know what it is,” Natasha said.

“Sure I do,” Steve told them. “You’re asking me to undergo the same procedure. I’m saying I’ll do it. I want to fight. I don’t care what it takes.”

“You’re... you’re sure about this?” Dr. Banner asked, sounding as taken aback as the others looked. “There’s no going back, you know.”

“Positive,” Steve assured him.

“You don’t even have any questions?”

“I have a question, actually,” Tony chimed in. “Where are you people planning on getting the power for the final kick? You’re not exactly hooked up to the grid out here and ViRRT ain’t exactly something you can cook up with a homemade generator.”

“We... did have to modify the procedure,” Dr. Banner admitted. A nod from Fury told him he could continue. “The virus is very fragile. It decays quickly outside a living host, so we actually have neither the power nor the resources to synthesize as much of the virus as we would like. But there is hope for a workaround. If we can get the viral load in your body high enough before the Vita Ray stage, we won’t need as much electricity to finish the job. Of course, that does mean we’ll need to—there’s not really a pleasant way of putting it but— _farm_ the virus inside your body, so you’ll need to spend a few weeks on immunosuppressants, the stronger the better, and that’ll mean a few weeks in an isolation ward, at the very least.”

“Change your mind?” Natasha asked with a lift of her brow.

“Nope,” Steve told her simply. Reconsidering wasn’t even a possibility. “When do we get started?”

“Right now,” Fury replied.

Now it was Steve’s turn to look taken aback. Somehow, he had expected there to be more waiting involved, but he certainly had no arguments.

Banner, on the other hand, looked hesitant, though he didn’t appear to have it in him to argue either. Instead, he punched a very long password into one of the yet-untouched machines behind Tony’s back and allowed it to scan his hand. As soon as he finished, a cylinder containing a syringe popped up for the taking.

“You guys work quick,” Tony said with a whistle once Banner had circled around to where he could see.

“We’ve been working on it for some time,” Natasha explained. “Most of it comes from blood work we’ve done on the people we rescue from the Labs, but your father’s notes were very useful. The bullet was mostly just to confirm what we already knew, and to cross reference with everyone in our database to find a match for our linchpin.”

“You knew, Romanoff, didn’t you?” Fury asked as Banner prepped the injection and motioned for Steve to have a seat.

“I had a hunch,” Natasha replied with a smile. “I didn’t recognize it at first, but he has the same face. Spitting image.” She turned her head as she said this to shoot Fury a knowing glance, and in the second before her hair fell over her shoulder, Steve got a glimpse of the back of her neck.

“Ready?” Dr. Banner asked.

It was empty, same as his. She was either lying about her time in the Labs, or she was much, much older than she appeared.

“Ready,” Steve replied.

The injection was a deep blue color, and required an unsettlingly long needle. Steve winced as it went into the flesh of his shoulder, but nothing could have prepared him for how much it would hurt once Dr. Banner pushed in the plunger. For a moment he could feel the burn of it creep its way down the artery of his arm like living fire, but rubbing the injection site served to reduce the pain down to a dull ache.

“That wasn’t so bad,” he said through gritted teeth, just to break the baited silence that followed.

“Good,” Fury replied, taking a few steps forward. “I assume you can take care of the rest of the prep without me. Romanoff, Stark’s presence is no longer required either.”

“Wait,” Steve said before he could make it to the door. Even Natasha looked up from whatever she was doing to Tony’s handcuffs. “Let me see Bucky first.”

Fury looked to Banner.

“It’ll be a couple of weeks before he has an immune reaction,” the doctor answered. “No risk of failure until then, and there’s no chance of cross-infection.”

Fury’s eye fixed itself on Steve instead, and for a moment Steve was certain Fury had the ability to see right through to his insides. If he did, whatever he saw appeared at first to have no effect on him. He turned to the door without a word.

Then, at the door, he stopped and looked back at where Steve still sat in the doctor’s chair.

“You coming or not?”

Steve didn’t need telling twice.

He kept a pace behind the swish of Fury’s coattails, not expecting to be acknowledged much less spoken to, but as soon as they were out in the hall and out of earshot, Fury said, without turning back to look at him, “you were very quick to agree to the procedure.”

“Sounded like I was the only guy for the job,” Steve replied.

“There’s more to it than just fighting,” Fury said. “You’ll have people looking up to you. Are you ready to become a symbol?”

Steve paused a very long time before he finally said, “I don’t know, sir. But, I will do the best I can.”

“Better hope that’s enough,” Fury said, and added nothing more until the two of them arrived at the medical wards. They passed through a large room with a dozen beds situated along the wall at even intervals, all empty. At the end, Fury pressed his hand to a scanner beside an imposing metal door.

“Find Doctor Banner in the isolation ward next door when you’re finished,” he said when the light turned green.

Steve nodded. He glanced over his shoulder as Fury strode off, and then, swallowing, wiped his sweaty palms onto the front of his pants.

In recovery, Natasha had said. Bucky was in recovery. What that could mean was anyone’s guess, but Steve was about to find out first hand. If Bucky really remembered, there was a good chance Steve would be the last person he wanted to see, but he’d rather learn as much on his own, whatever that cost him, than have to hear it from anyone else. At the very least, he wanted to chance to apologize. He could ask that much of Bucky, right?

The hinges made the smallest of creaks when he pushed the door open. Before it was even wide enough to pass through Bucky was jolted up from the heap he had made of himself at the very edge of the bed, his forearm thrown in front of him like a barrier, braced at the wrist against an oncoming attack. The hole Steve had left in his repair efforts was patched now, though with a metal of a slightly different sheen. At any rate, whatever attack he was expecting never came. Steve remained in the doorway, every bit like a deer in headlights.

Bucky lowered his arm, slowly. If it was possible, his hair was even more disheveled than before, and there was a ring of crusted blood around his nose, but his eyes were clear and focused and very, very large. When his feet touched the floor and he took a step forward, it was without a sound. The door swung quietly shut.

There was something almost terrified in Bucky’s eyes, but the rest of him stalked like a predator, tense and deadly silent. Steve was certain that if he wanted to kill him he probably could before Steve could so much as shout his name. An assassin, they had called him. For the first time, Steve understood what they meant. He couldn’t take his eyes off him. His face was so different but so familiar Steve wanted nothing more than to just look at him for hours if he could, even if the guilt of everything he’d done ate him alive. He didn’t flinch when Bucky reached him. Fingers brushed his nicked ear, and still he didn’t look away.

For the first time, Bucky exhaled.

“You’re real,” he whispered.

Steve’s chest ached at the implications for all the times he wasn’t. Despite everything he had wanted to tell Bucky all these years, he found himself, unexpectedly, at a complete loss for words. There was no apology enough for him to voice, if he could even trust his breath to voice it.

“Do you remember?” he asked, so quiet the words were barely more than puffs of air.

“Steve,” Bucky answered. His grip tightened, fingers digging into the sides of Steve’s head before they slid through his hair and pulled him forward. Bucky’s metal arm was cold against his back and crushingly tight. He could scarcely do more than ball his fists into the fabric at Bucky’s sides and wheeze, which luckily served its purpose.

“Steve,” Bucky repeated, now gripping Steve’s shoulders so fiercely it would be no surprise to find them bruised later. His eyes were wet, or it could have been a trick of the light because suddenly it was all he could seem to do to keep from laughing. “Steve.”

“It’s me,” Steve replied, unable to keep himself from mirroring Bucky’s smile. “Bucky, it’s okay, it’s me, you’re safe.”

“You’re safe,” Bucky echoed. “Thank god, Steve, you’re safe.”

He could have laughed if doing so wouldn’t have torn his heart right in two. “How do you feel?”

Bucky shook his head. “Better than I have in ages,” he breathed. “It’s all still piecing itself together, but, but—”

“C’mon, let’s have a seat,” Steve told him past the cold weight in his gut.

Bucky cautiously allowed himself to be guided to the edge of the bed. Steve situated himself beside him and dabbed the edge of his sleeve on his tongue to scrub at the dried blood under Bucky’s nose. His expertise in biotech may have been limited, but he knew enough to know that a nosebleed was the result of a mental strain.

“Stark didn’t bother going easy on you, huh?” he remarked.

“Stark?” Bucky asked, sounding so distraught he might have for a minute been himself. “I got to meet Stark?”

“His son,” Steve corrected, and Bucky relaxed immediately. “He was the one who fixed you, don’t you remember?”

Bucky shook his head. “Last thing I remember... we were in a cave, I think. Or was it underwater? You were there, I know that.”

“It was both, sort of,” Steve told him. “We haven’t left. This is SHIELD. It’s the base for the resistance against the New Order.”

“Just like we talked about,” Bucky filled in on his own as a boyish grin spread across his face. “When we were kids. We made it.”

Steve stifled a chuckle behind the lump in his throat at the sight and tried to steady himself with a shaking breath. “Yeah, we did.”

“Is that wrong?” Bucky asked suddenly, eyebrows knitting together. “Was I not supposed to say that?”

“No, no, I mean _yes_ —” Steve wiped at his eyes with the backs of his hands, but it didn’t help much. “Keep talking. I want to know what else you remember.”

“But why are you—”

“I’m fine,” Steve assured him. “I’m fine, Bucky, really. For once, I really am. What else do you remember?”

“Only pieces, so far,” he continued hesitantly. “You, um... a desk that turned into a bed, a girl... my sister, I think. Did I have a sister?”

“You had two,” Steve croaked, stomach sinking. “Becca and Leah.”

“What happened to them?” Bucky asked.

It felt like the ground had dropped out from beneath Steve. “They—” He tried to rein himself in and breathe, but air only seemed to come in hiccups. “I’m sorry,” he managed at last. It came out as a sob. “Bucky, it’s all my fault. It’s all my fault. I’m so sorry.”

Bucky deserved a better apology than this. He deserved better, period, but he definitely deserved an explanation, even when there was no explanation to give. He deserved his life back—his _whole_ life, before Mandate 39 trapped him indoors with the worst kind of friend a guy could ask for. He deserved the world, and Steve could give him none of it.

Yet here Bucky was regardless, pulling Steve’s hands away from scrubbing uselessly at his face.

“Steve, _breathe_ ,” he said. “I can’t understand a word you’re saying.”

Steve tried. He sucked down big, shaking lungfuls of air and tried to find the words to explain.

“It was my fault,” he choked. “It was my fault the EPs showed up because I left the curtain open for everyone to see, and I wasn’t strong enough to fight them, and I couldn’t—I couldn’t—your sisters, your parents, my dad, _you_ —it should have been me. It should have been me they took instead.”

He couldn’t even bear to look at Bucky, but Bucky would have none of it, ducking his head down to peer at Steve from underneath. His eyes were full of nothing but concern, which was somehow even worse than loathing, or judgement, or contemptment, or any of the number of things Steve had always imagined to see on the ghost of his face for all these years.

He turned his head away, but it was too late. It was all coming back to him—all the guilt he’d spent years so carefully tucking away out of sight, all the hurt, the loss, the loneliness, the blame, all the demons that haunted him until he locked them up somewhere tight. The house had been small but the prison in his head was a vast and endless sea, and it seemed determined to drain itself here and now.

It wasn’t a pretty thing, but Bucky weathered it through. His head was a soft weight on Steve’s shoulder, his hand sure and steady on his back. The shoulder Steve had buried his face in rose and fell with even, slow breaths. It was better than Steve warranted.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Bucky told him.

Steve shoot his head. “I’ll make it up to you,” He promised like he hadn’t even heard. “I know I can’t, not really, but I can make sure no one else has to go through what you did. I can—I can fight. I’ll—”

“Steve,” Bucky said, pulling away to get a better look at him. “You weren’t responsible for any of that, you unplugged little shit. Where did you even get the idea? Did you think you could take the whole squadron on yourself? That’s ridiculous, know that, right?”

“Not anymore,” Steve shook his head again. “There’s a way—there’s a way to fix me.”

Bucky looked confused before his expression suddenly dropped. Steve swore he could physically see the color drain from his face.

“What do you mean fix you?” he asked, his voice startlingly low and hard. With the way his shoulders were tensed, he looked ready for a fight.

“Make me an Alpha,” Steve replied none the less. “I didn’t think it was possible either until I saw you, but if it can be done once it ca—”

“No!” Bucky burst, shoving himself away and to his feet “You can’t let them do that to you, Steve! You can’t agree to it!”

“Why not?” Steve demanded.

“It was  _horrible_ ,” his voice cracked over the word. He grabbed Steve’s shoulders, fit to rattle him. Steve didn’t think he’d ever seen Bucky that scared in his entire life. “You can’t let them. You can’t. You’ll die! You might think you’re strong enough but you’re just _not_ , Steve. You’re not strong enough for this.”

Steve scowled and climbed to his feet as well. “Guess we’ll just have to find out, won’t we?” he said.

Bucky’s skin was the color of milk. “You didn’t,” he said through his teeth.

“Did,” Steve replied, taking a step back from him and jutting out his jaw. “Too late to go back now. Wouldn’t even if I could.”

“Steve,” Bucky growled. “That’s—”

“Unplugged?” Steve finished for him more bitterly than he intended. “Well aware, thanks. What’s the point of being here if I can’t help anyone? They already have doctors and mechanics, smarter ones than me. This is something only I can do.”

“No it isn’t!” Bucky shouted, much louder than necessary. “They lied, Steve. This isn’t for you. There has to be an antidote. There has to be—”

“This is my decision, Bucky!” Steve yelled over him.

“It’s—” Bucky began, but whatever thought he had was cut short and replaced by the blare of an alarm siren. The boys froze as the lights dimmed and then switched to red.

“What is that?” Steve asked, not daring to move.

“I don’t know, what’s code red?” Bucky asked.

They looked at each other, Steve’s wide terrified eyes to Bucky’s cold, set ones.

“Nothing good.”

Bucky’s looked to the wall like he was straining his ears for something, but what he might hear over the sound of the alarms was beyond Steve.

“Stay here,” he said suddenly, and made for the door.

Steve followed at his heels. “The hell I’m staying,” he told him.

“Oh yes you are,” Bucky said.

Before Steve could even open his mouth to argue, he raised a single metal finger and gave Steve’s forehead a light tap. It didn’t hurt. Steve didn’t even feel it, but he blinked and suddenly he was jolting upright in Bucky’s cot. The lights were still red, the alarms were still blaring, and the room was totally empty.

“Bucky!” he growled.

When he went to push the door open, it only gave a fraction of an inch. It was enough to peek through, and enough to see the metal bed pushed up against it to barricade Steve inside.

“You can’t do this!” he yelled, despite Bucky likely being long gone by now. “Not again!”

He shoved at the door, but the combined weight of it and the bed was easily too much for him. Steve threw his whole weight against it and still nothing budged. His lungs were growing tighter. The room felt smaller than it used to be. The ceiling shrunk, the walls contracted.

“Not! Again!” Steve begged with each push. “Not again, not again, not again!”

He hurled himself against the metal one last time. It connected with his sore shoulder so hard he couldn’t help but cry out, but even his whimper of pain wasn’t loud enough to conceal the distinct scrape of metal against the floor. He took a step back and indeed, the crack in the door was larger, but still not enough. He grit his teeth, took a few more steps back, and hit it again with a running start.

It hurt so much he saw stars. If the door itself wasn’t there to catch him, he was certain his knees would have given out completely. He leaned against it to catch his breath. When he looked over, the crack was now several inches wide. He smiled, pushed himself upright, and repeated.

In the end, he got it just wide enough to wiggle himself through. Sweat was beading on his brow and his legs felt like gelatin, but he was free. He stumbled for the next door, and when both ends of the hallway proved equally empty, took a turn at random.

“Bucky!” he called over the sirens. “Bucky!”

He didn’t find Bucky, or anyone else for that matter. The hallway was deserted. Steve broke into a run.

“Bucky!”

“Over here!” A voice called that most certainly didn’t belong to Bucky at all.

Steve jogged to a halt, lungs and legs burning, and whirled around to find the source.

“In here, door on your right,” the voice continued. “No, your other right. Its is wide open, come on!”

Steve had run right past him. He backed up a few steps and peered into a very small room with nothing but a single desk in it. Seated across from the door was none other than Tony Stark, wrists magnetized together around a bar reaching floor to ceiling.

“A little help,” he said, wiggling his fingers.

“What happened?” Steve asked, looking around the rest of the room. There was quite literally nothing but barren walls and a mirror. “Where did everyone go?”

“Where do you think?” Tony asked right back. “To deal with the massive security breach. Now come on, there’s no knowing how much time we have.”

Steve looked down at the metal bracelets, then up at Tony.

“You did this,” he realized. “You set off the alarm so you could escape.”

“I’d love to take credit, I really would, but not this time,” Tony sighed impatiently. “I am, however, going to take every advantage of it. Now, if you would be so kind, there’s an electric screwdriver in my right pocket that looks _exactly_ like a pen—”

“No, you did,” Steve interrupted. “When your... your... your interface thing restarted. It sent something out, didn’t it? Bucky’s virus, or worm or—”

“Locator signal?” Tony finished for him. “Oh, yeah, wouldn’t doubt it. There’s no such thing as a truly closed system. But if we’re right, that means this place is probably crawling with whatever the New Order uses to squelch rebels, and I’d rather not stick around to find out what that is. So what do you say? Pen, pocket, you, me...”

“Would they looking for Bucky?” Steve asked.

“Oh what is it _with_ you?” Tony rolled his eyes. “Of course they’re looking for him. Do you know what the Winter Soldier _is_?”

“My friend,” Steve replied. “And I gotta go find him.”

Which was also the reason that he then circled around to the other side of the table and knelt down to fish the screwdriver out of Tony’s pocket.

“Wow, easy,” Tony squirmed. “It’s right—ack, no, that is _not_ it. Handsy. No it’s—there it is, you got it.”

It did look very much like a pen. Steve had had an electric screwdriver back in his workshop at home, but it was nowhere near as tiny as this one, and definitely not disguised as a writing implement.

“You have to twist it—” Tony began, but Steve had already puzzled as much out. He turned the base, and where the ballpoint tip would usually come out there came instead a faint blue light.

“Great,” Tony said. “Okay, now you just—”

Brandishing the screwdriver in his fist, Steve brought it down as hard as he could against the point where the magnetic bracelets met. There was probably a safer way to disassemble the cuffs, but he didn’t have time for it, and Tony was an Alpha anyway.

When the hit landed, every hair on Tony’s head stood on end and every muscle went tight at once. The cuffs clinked apart with a loud spark and a small puff of smoke.

“That was not what I was gonna say, but that works too,” Tony said, rubbing his newly liberated wrists. The room smelt distinctly of burnt hair and skin, but there were no burns on him that Steve could see.

“That was for fixing Bucky,” he told him, handing back the screwdriver. “Now we’re even.”

“Great,” Tony muttered. He nodded down the hall and added, “if you’re still on about your death wish, your sasquach went that way.”

Steve’s heart sped up. “Really?”

“Yes, really,” Tony replied, pocketing the screwdriver. “About three minutes ago. If you hurry up, you can still—”

But Steve was already out the door.

Even with the hunch that he was headed in the right direction, SHIELD was still a maze of hallways. Steve stuck to the bigger ones, hoping that Bucky might have done the same, but when he finally came to an intersection of two major corridors there was no longer any clear path to take.

“Bucky?” he called down none in particular.

He didn’t expect a response, but what he got was a wordless yell and a loud crash. He sprinted for the source and rounded the corner in time to one man throw another against a wall like he weighed nothing at all. Before the one being thrown could even climb to his feet again, the attacker kneed him in the gut and wrenched him into the air by his collar. It all happened so quickly, Steve didn’t realize what he was seeing until his eye caught the glint of a metal arm scrambling uselessly to gain purchase on the attacker’s.

“Bucky!” Steve shouted.

Both men looked his way, and he had just enough time to realize that the other man was no man at all. The skin around his eyes was tight and smooth, giving him the uncanny, less than human appearance of an AI. Its eyes scanned Steve up and down before turning back to his real target, who was still all too distracted.

“Steve,” Bucky choked. “Get ou—”

But he never got a chance to finish before his head was slammed violently against the wall, once, twice, and then again until it left a small red smear.

“Stop it!” Steve yelled, but this time no one paid any attention. By the time he closed the distance, Bucky’s thrashing was reduced to a mockery of itself. “Hey!” Steve called, latching himself at the AI’s arm to yank it away, but it was like trying to get a tree to change its shape. “Over here!”

He punched its side, and that, at least, registered him as a threat. The AI turned its head. Without looking, it readjusted to hold Bucky by the throat with one hand. Bucky made a sound barely above a whimper in response, though Steve didn’t recognize it as an attempt at a warning until the AI’s hand was already flying at him.

He braced for it, but it didn’t help the flash of pain or the whiplash as Steve suddenly found himself punted ten or twenty feet back, the friction of the floor ripping up the skin of his arm. He pushed himself upright again with no small effort.

Bucky was by this point limp in the AI’s hands, head lulled to the side. A little stream of red trickled from his mouth. It was nothing compared to the wall behind him. Steve’s fists tightened.

“Hey!” he wheezed. “Leave him alone, you ugly bastard!” The only thing he had to throw was his shoes, so he hurled one, and when it missed, the other. Miraculously, this one managed to hit the AI square in the side of the head, and it turned to glare at him as Steve shakily got to his feet.

“It’s me you want,” he puffed between breaths, and then he did the only thing he could do. He pulled up the hem of his shirt.

The AI cocked its head, narrowed his eyes, and to Steve’s great relief, relinquished its grip. Bucky slid down the wall into a heap, leaving a red smear behind him. In the seconds Steve had, he tried to ascertain if he was breathing, but from this distance it was impossible to say for certain. The AI was moving toward him now, and the only thing left for Steve was to run.

He didn’t expect to make it far, and he didn’t. It caught him by the back of the collar just around the next bend and hoisted him up off his feet like a doll. As Steve’s legs kicked uselessly beneath him, all he could think was, this was it. This was how he died, protecting Bucky. It was only fair. He was, surprisingly, content with it ending this way, even if he was still going take it as a fight to the last. Sure, Fury and Natasha and who knows who else would be disappointed, but surely there would be some stain left of him they could work with. Bucky was probably right; the procedure was bound to kill him after all.

There was a sharp prick as a needle in the AI’s thumb pressed into his skin to draw a sample. Illegal though he was, it was apparently still procedure to type him. Typical. He wondered what the New Order would do if they found an illegal Beta. Would they spare one of their precious flock, or kill them for their parents’ crimes? Not that it mattered. An Epsilon was an Epsilon, no matter the rest of it.

The AI’s forearm beeped when the test was complete. Steve grit his teeth for what was to come, but the AI didn’t move. He couldn’t see its readouts, or its face, but he knew hesitation was his final chance for a struggle. His efforts, feeble though they were, were cut short by another needle. This one was much larger, and burrowed by spring into the arteries of his neck.

Steve gasped. The effect was instantaneous. He was out before he ever hit the ground.

**  
**  
  
  


By the time Steve’s mother came back from her early-morning visit to a patient who had fallen ill in the night, there were no bodies left to find. Broken furniture aplenty, and smeared puddles of fresh blood, but the house was empty and quiet and dead. She’d never talk about what it was like to come home to such decimation, to suddenly blink and lose everyone she had ever known, but Steve would find the scars of it left in her silences over the years to come.

She didn’t cry, that much Steve knew. The first tears sprang forth only when she finally found her son, an inconsolable little boy in the wall with bloodied hands and tears and snot streaming down his face, and with no intention of being held tightly to her chest when she finally pried him free. She wanted very much to protect him, to bottle him up and keep him from the reality of the world, but struggle as a mother might, she could not do it forever, especially not when that reality was seeped into the woodgrains of her son’s bedroom floor.

His eyes were fixed on the stain when she pulled away, wide and blue and terrified. He was frozen perfectly still but for the tiny, shallow breaths that wracked his chest. There was much work left to do—cleaning, fixing, falsifying documents. She would be alone in the task, but no matter the difficulties she had yet to face, the hardest of all was the one she faced now.

Her son knew what death was, but only now would he understand it.

“Don’t look,” she said, trying to pull his head back into her chest, but the blood pulled him from her like a magnet.

“No,” he sobbed. It was barely above a whisper. He pushed her away as children do when they grow up and got to his feet. “No,” he repeated, louder, stumbling toward the threshold where the only trace of somebody he once loved dried, sticky and dark. “No... no, no, no!”

He was running for the stairs before his mother could stop him, tracking small, red footprints in his wake. She followed, silent, as he tore through the house, calling the names of people who deserved their fate no less than he deserved his. In the end, she was there to catch him where he fell, but though she could mend his hands and blot his tears, his wails echoed with a wound that ran much deeper, one she could never, ever reach, much less close.

To be alone was surely a fate far worse than death.

**  
**  
  
  


Bucky Barnes was dead.

**  
**  
  
  


“Run the samples again.”

It was dark.

There was a fog in Steve’s brain, like waking up too early after taking too much cold medicine. The world was there but he couldn’t touch it if he tried. Everything hurt. He tried anyway.

Restraints dug into his wrist.

“Not yet you don’t.”

It was dark.

This time, there was a low rumble of voices in the next room. Steve tried to focus on them, but it was like reading the same passage over and over again; the words did not fit together with any meaning. His body wanted him to go back to sleep, and wanted it desperately. The air was flat with staleness and sharp with disinfectant. He fought to keep his eyes open. The metal table was very cold.

“We’re lucky the droid even detected it, otherwise we would have never known.”

The voices moved closer. They were right outside his door. He could see two figures silhouettes through the frosted glass set in the door. One man, one woman. It was no one he recognized.

“I don’t care about how incompetent you lab coats are. Do we have time or don’t we?” the woman demanded.

“Not much very much.”

“ _How_ much?”

Focus. Focus. Steve twisted his wrist in the restraint. He rolled his hand small and pulled, little by little.

“A few days at most. We still can’t identify the vector. We need more time. If we let him progress any further his immune system will wipe out any chance we ever had.”

A quiet pop, and Steve got his hand free. The second restraint should have been simple to undo, but his fingers felt thick and clumsy.

“How hard could it be to infect another subject? Figure something out.”

“We’ve tried everything, ma’am. He’s not infectious. All our attempts have failed, and—”

“I know that, believe me,” the woman spat. “Try. Something. Else.”

“There’s... there’s nothing else we can do. The only way left is to—”

“Are you seriously trying to tell me _that_ is our only option?”

Steve tried to sit up but there was a strap across his chest. He worked it open next, as quickly as he could manage.

“It’s the only way, ma’am. It’s that or we lose the serum.”

Steve sat up, his head reeling with fever. He fought past the momentary blackening of his vision to grope at the restraints on his legs, but it was too late.

The door burst open with a crash. He looked over in time to see a woman with freckles and flaming red hair even brighter than Natasha’s push past a bespeckled doctor. Before he knew it there were five immaculate fingernails digging into his jaw.

“Is this supposed to be an escape attempt?” she growled, squeezing his air passage. Steve tried to reach up and grab her wrist, but she caught his first and twisted. He bit his tongue to keep from crying out.

“You’re not going _anywhere_ ,” she told him, face inches from his while he struggled to catch his breath through the pain. “You’re mine now, see? And I’m not letting you get away that easy, not after what your granddaddy did to my daddy.” She chortled, a high, cruel, shrill sound. “Once we get everything we need out of you, I’m gonna kill you myself, and I’m gonna kill you _slow_ , Captain.”

Steve’s tongue felt sluggish and too big for his mouth. “Didn’t think I was signing up for babysitting,” he slurred.

The look on her face was well worth the tightening of her grip. There was a clatter as she groped at the tools laid out by the metal table’s side. Her fingers closed around a syringe. She wrenched Steve’s head to the side and plunged the needle into his neck with little regard before throwing him back down on the table like an offending rag. He tried to push himself back up again, but his arms suddenly felt like they were full of cotton.

“Permission granted, doctor,” he heard the woman say before the darkness swallowed him. “He’s no fun to me as a little imp anyway. Make sure he’s awake for it, and make sure he screams.”

It was dark.

Next thing he knew: snap snap snap.

“Responsive. Administering doripenem.”

A pinprick. Steve winced and opened his eyes.

There was a bright light shining down on him, blinding him of nearly anything else. His arms were restrained in multiple places. The same with his legs and chest. He couldn’t even move to struggle.

“Raise him,” a woman’s voice said, and the surface he was strapped to shuddered and moved. His restraints kept his feet suspended off the ground. As he squinted through the light, he noticed there were people milling around—a dozen of them, at least, all clad in white but one. It was the red-haired woman, Steve was sure of it. She smiled. Too many teeth.

“Initiate,” she said.

Metal walls closed in around him. He could hear muffled voices echoing commands and confirmations, but the only sound that came through clearly was that of his own heartbeat racing out of his chest.

The light buzzed as it grew brighter.

It started as a bone-deep ache. Dull, but uncomfortably present. Brighter, and it was an itch under his skin he couldn’t lift a finger to scratch. Brighter, and suddenly, too bright to keep his eyes open, and it was pain, growing and growing until it was a fire surging through the entirety of him. He wanted to scream. He wanted to die. But he did neither, because he knew there was someone out there straining her ears for the sound of his will breaking, and whoever she was, however bleak the hope of escape, he would not give her the satisfaction even with his final breath. So he set his jaw and he clenched his fists and he sent his mind elsewhere, to a fragile sliver of sky beyond his bedroom window, and a notebook, and a boy.

It was dark.

It was _noisy_.

Steve could hear a radiator buzzing, and the florescent lights in the hall, and footsteps running somewhere far, far away. Shouts, too. Voices. He could hear the ticking of a clock. He could hear the leather restraints groan when he tried to move, and he could smell the disinfectant and sharp scent of metal. There was another smell, too, something more familiar. He inhaled slowly, but his lungs were kind to him this time and didn’t rattle or wheeze.

He couldn’t place it, but it was stronger now. Metal. Soap. A sliver of sky.

And footsteps. Just on set.

And a voice. “Steve?” it breathed, shaking, and then stronger, “Oh my god, Steve! Steve!”

He opened his eyes to the most beautiful sight in the world. Bucky’s eyes raked over him like he was the one that couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing, but then this was not the first time Bucky had come back from the dead to him. He’d even cut his hair to a reasonable length since Steve had last seen him, though a shade of stubble remained on his face. His eyes, too, were several shades bluer, and the rest of him stood out crisp and clear around the edges like it never had before.

If Bucky were dead, he had returned to earth an angel, though the hand on Steve’s shoulder was solid and sure and impossibly real. It withdrew it only to undo Steve’s restraints, but the moment Steve could, he reached up to clumsily grasp onto Bucky’s shoulders as if the second he could no longer touch him, Bucky might just blow away in the winds, a spectre.

“Bucky,” he said. “Bucky, Bucky, I thought you were dead.”

Bucky breathed a chuckle. “I thought you were smaller,” he replied, voice still full of disbelief. “C’mon, get up. We gotta get out of here.”

He helped Steve to his feet. The ground seemed a very long way down, but he didn’t fall. The first step was the hardest.

“Why did you come for me?” he asked, keeping up with Bucky’s hurried pace down the hallways without trouble, lit only at intervals by emergency power.

“Why wouldn’t I?” Bucky asked like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “I had to tear half the facility apart to get this far. Don’t tell me you aren’t grateful!”

“I’m—” Bucky put up a hand to silence him as he came to a corner, pressing himself against a wall and checking down both corridors before charging on ahead. “After everything I did to you?” Steve continued. “After I let your family die?”

“Everything you—” Bucky stopped dead and rounded on him. “Steve, for the love of _god_ ,” he groaned. “How many times do I have to say it? None of it was your fault!”

“But—”

“And even if it fucking _was_ —which it’s _not_ —I forgive you, alright?”

“But I—”

“Don’t say it. I remember it, the whole thing. I’ve had weeks now to put it all back together and I forgive you. I forgive you, Steve.”

“Bucky, I—”

“Not to mention that you’ve saved my life at least twice since then,” Bucky continued with a wave. “Let it _go_ , Steve, please. If anything, you made it all bearable for me. I should be _thanking_ you. I would have gone _mad_ in that house without you. ”

“But—”

“What is it going to _take_ with you?” Bucky moaned. “A fucking written declaration of peace? Because I’ll write you one, I will, just as soon as we get out of h—”

It was Steve who cut him off this time, with a yank at his shirt collar. He distinctly remembered Bucky being taller, but that fact was irrelevant because his lips were just as soft as they had been the last time. Bucky froze and then melted, kissing back with a desperation Steve had not expected. When he pulled away with what seemed like every ounce of his control, he it was all he could do to brace himself against Steve’s arms as if he didn’t trust his own knees to hold him up.

“God, Steve, don’t do this to me now,” he muttered, head hung as he tried to catch his breath.

“No?” Steve asked.

“No, yes, I mean yes,” Bucky answered, straightening himself up and making a poor effort of brushing himself off for some sense of composure. “Just, god, does this look like the best time to you?”

The ground beneath their feet gave a shudder in response.

“Then when?” Steve asked.

“Soon,” Bucky promised. “Soon.”

The floor gave another threatening quake, and then fire from below deafened them. Through the smoke, metal fingers curled around Steve’s. He ran—to what daunting future he yet didn’t know, but at least Bucky now ran with him, and that was more than enough. He ran, and Bucky followed. Whatever war may come, he needed nothing more.


End file.
